From markets to math

Watch this graph to watch financial market insanity:

This astonishing GIF comes from Nanex, and shows the amount of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 to January 2012. (Which means that the Knightmare craziness of last week is not included.)

I bet this school cut back on sex education as well, what do you think? Get Tested Or Get Out: School Forces Pregnancy Tests on Girls, Kicks out Students Who Refuse or are Pregnant

Protecting your identity online and more.

Merika the Beautiful.

Water Wars.

Finding lost pyramids with Google Earth?

Romney's Mormon sense of entitlement includes lying.



The gun.

If you don't have a facebook account you are a terrorist!... or just weird.

A creationist science text book.  And their distrust of set theory.

Prepare for loss of brain cells

P Z Myers warns us.

News worth not pulling your hair out

Zack is 17-year-old high school senior at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. What sets him apart from his peers – and why we’re making him this week’s Skeptical Ninja – is his tireless efforts in ridding creationism from Louisiana’s science classrooms.

He’s already won a victory. His efforts have helped convince the Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to buy biology textbooks that accurately teach the theory of evolution, despite powerful forces on the opposing side.

Questions questions questions....

This would explain a lot:

Parallel universe?!

Cat fight?

Rush Limbaugh Picks On Karl Rove For Tea Party Comments

They're never going away, are they?

Creationism lives on in US public schools

A Cirrate octopus (rare and therefore extinctly edible?):



Coming around to see ourselves going?

Astronomers find oldest galaxy yet

Truer words have never been bespeaked!

Remember the creationism/ intelligent design debacle: the Kitmiller v. Dover Area School Board court case? Just finished Charles Pierce's Idiot America and he mentioned the utterly quote of a local pastor, Ray Mummert:

We've been attacked,"Mummert said,"by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture."

Exactly. Duly noted.

In a perfect world

We wouldn't need to get our facts from comedians.

h/t to Michael.

Shouldn't this bother the creationists more than the evolutionists?

I mean, we'd be wasting what God made for us 6000 years ago, right? It shows we aren't very good stewards of His creation....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 800 animal and plant species have gone extinct in the past five centuries with nearly 17,000 now threatened with extinction, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reported on Thursday.

A detailed analysis of these numbers indicates the international community will fail to meet its 2010 goal of bolstering biodiversity -- maintaining a variety of life forms -- a commitment made by most governments in 2002.

Based on data released in 2008 in the union's Red List, the new IUCN analysis is being released now to precede the 2010 target year and to draw a connection between crises in the financial and environmental realms, said report editor Jean-Christophe Vie.

"We don't want to make a choice between nature and the economy; we just want to bring nature to the same level when you have to take a decision," Vie said by telephone from Switzerland.

In fact, I'd assume if God gets really pissed we should watch out for plagues of locusts to Canada and droughts to California and that kind of stuff....

Not a multiple choice question

Write your answer in full citing scientific research.

DB shows how one scientist responded to Creationists (via PZ Myers). Click to read the excellent response.

As for me, I grew up religious and throughout my schooling I came across concepts that were not acceptable to my religion. My church's and family's reaction was not to force the school district to implement my faith's tenets into the curriculum, but to take the classes needed without demur. My faith was not shaken by exposure to alternate theories, I was not contaminated by thinking scientifically. (Why I left my church later is easily explained. I grew up.)

This bizarre need of Creationists to sweep reality aside for their children so they won't hear anything but their own ideas echoed back is sad. Is their understanding of God so fragile that even the whisper about the theory of evolution makes them fall from grace? Are they that afraid of the scientific process, fact-finding and rigorous methods of proof that they must deny its worth?

If God is All, then asking questions and demanding answers shouldn't indicate weakness of spirit or lack of faith. It shows an eagerness to learn which is what humans are hardwired to do. How does creeping and peeking through life, recoiling at facts and saying no constantly honor His creation?

Religion belongs in church. It does not belong in school (unless it's a class about religion, the Bible, philosophy, etc). Trying to jam faith-based ideas into a science class weakens both and does neither any service.

*edited for clarity.

Roger Ebert takes on Ben Stein

A violent stomping ensues. Very satisfying.

I have a new hero

Evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University.

Who knows how to smack down creationists.

Amen.

Texas, the lone idiot state....

Bablogger of Bad Astronomy:

Well, it’s truly official: Texas is doomed.

Why? I’ve talked before about the guy that’s the head of the State Board of Education. His name is Don McLeroy, and he’s perhaps the least qualified guy on the planet to head a BoE. He’s a creationist. He thinks science is evil. The list of his disqualifications to be in charge of a BoE would be so big… well, it would be Texas-sized big.

I predicted nothing but doom and shame for the BoE this year, and it brings me no joy at all to say I was right. McLeroy’s latest antic — though I would call it the first shot fired in a war, a war on reality — was over, of all things, the English standards. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let "social conservatives" on the board draft a new set overnight.

Overnight? Think that’s better than Standards teachers and experts spent nearly three years on?

He warns that where Texas goes in schooling, the nation follows. Let's hope this time he is wrong.

Hovering at the edge of the Dark Ages

One in eight U.S. high school teachers presents creationism as a valid alternative to evolution, says a poll published in the Public Library of Science Biology.

Of more than 900 teachers who responded to a poll conducted by Penn State University political scientist Michael Berkman and colleagues, 32 percent agreed that creationism and intelligent design should be taught as scientifically unsound. Forty percent said such explanations are religiously valid but inappropriate for science class.

However, 25 percent said they devoted classroom time to creationism or intelligent design. Of these, about one-half -- 12 percent of all teachers -- called creationism a "valid scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species," and the same number said that "many reputable scientists view these as valid alternatives to Darwinian theory." (The full study makes for interesting reading: Evolution and Creationism in America’s Classrooms: A National Portrait.

Creationist picked for head of Texas state board of education.

They still are trying to get their hands on those subversive science textbooks:

Many in Texas are worried by McLeroy’s record:

Dr. McLeroy was one of four board members who voted against proposed high school biology textbooks because he felt their coverage of evolution was “too dogmatic” and did not include possible flaws in Charles Darwin’s theory of how life on Earth evolved from lower forms.

McLeroy, though, has his reasons:

Dr. McLeroy said his vote on the biology books had nothing to do with censorship or religion and was based on “good science.”

“It is wrong to teach opinion as fact,” he said.

Michael Medved resents the question about evolution

That the Republican presidential candidates had to answer. Trifecta of New Pairodimes takes him apart. Trifecta's responses are italized:

In the midst of the fierce campaign for the Presidential nomination, why did the Republican candidates choose to make an issue of the theory of evolution? In truth, none of the candidates ever emphasized this dispute, until Chris Matthews of MSNBC asked the ten contenders in the first debate if any of them rejected Darwin.

Our batshit insane candidates wanted to paper over their views that Jesus rode on a brontosaurus when a donkey wasn't available. Leave it to the liberal media to make them talk about their views.

When three candidates – Huckabee, Brownback and Tancredo – duly raised their hands, the media began focusing on creationism vs. intelligent design vs. evolution, as if the President of the United States got to make curriculum decisions for every local school board in the country.

No, the President gets to appoint 24 year old snot nosed kids to NASA to edit scientists work that mention things such as global warming, and to suggest that they push intelligent design. God don't make junk, and since we are created in his image, it's unpossible for us to foul the air with toxic crap.

Which brings me to another series of questions I'd like to ask these candidates:

If you don't believe in evolution, does that mean you believe the world is only 6 thousand years old?

Or do you believe that we've always been what we are today, but the world does evolve?

If you don't believe in evolution, do you believe in continental drift and plate tectonics?

Do you believe the stars are billions of years old?

If you don't believe in these things, do you believe in science? Facts?

Would you support space exploration?

The Hubble?

The International Space Station?

If you don't believe in evolution, can science teach us anything?

If you don't believe in evolution, and don't believe in the facts that science teaches us, do you believe in the Rapture?

Would you assist the Second Coming if you could?

Just a few questions to hone in on what would really drive a Republican president who doesn't believe in evolution.

Why questions about teeth chew a hole in creationism

And explain why T-Rex wasn't crunching coconuts.

Christopher O'Brien of Northstate Science discusses what Ken Ham’s Creation 'Museum' is doing. The 'museum ' tries to cause doubt in science by pointing out bears have sharp teeth and eat vegetation therefore dinosaurs could have been herbivores: (my bold)

Certainly the responses to these observations are important, but that is not what prompted me to write this post. What really intrigued me was the process I engaged in while obtaining the information. It is the process of discovery that, as much as the answers, serves to radically distinguish science from creationism in all its forms. As I said, my reader raised several issues that, on face value, would be sufficient for most people to stop and wonder if Ham and AIG weren’t at least raising a legitimate issue. For Ham, AIG, and on a different level, the intelligent design advocates, inquiry would completely cease at this point. See, O’Brien is wrong: polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bear teeth and they exclusively eat meat…hence it is possible that tyrannosaurs ate vegetation at one time. Here, the entire goal is accomplished: raise reasonable doubt with the general populace at large.

But science follows a completely different process. Upon reading the phrase “polar bear teeth are hardly different from other bears” the first thing I did was ask myself, “is that true?” and reach for a book on mammalian anatomy; and I did it so sub-consciously and automatically that the significance of the act did not become apparent until a few hours later. Scientists constantly question whether their data (and others') are correct…it’s ingrained as part of the process. The same cannot be said for creationists.

The deliberate misuse of the word 'theory' is another attempt to muddy the waters, trying to get people to have reasonable doubt over a rigourous process such as science. Remember, gravity is a theory, so it's a theory that holds us onto an orbiting ball as it hurtles through space.

I'd rather have science than faith explain to me why I don't fall off.

What big teeth you have, T-Rex....

The better to open coconuts, my dear!

In the middle of the lobby of the 50,000-square-foot Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., a 20-foot waterfall tumbles. Two life-size figures of children with long black hair and in buckskin clothes play in the stream a few feet from two towering Tyrannosaurus Rex models that can move and roar. The museum, which cost $25 million to build and has a sea of black asphalt parking lots for school buses, has a scale model of Noah’s ark that shows how Noah solved the problem of fitting dinosaurs into the three levels of the vessel—he loaded only baby dinosaurs. And on the wooden model, infant dinosaurs cavort with horses, giraffes, hippopotamuses, penguins and bears. There is an elaborate display of the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve, naked but strategically positioned so as not to display breasts or genitals, swim in a river as giant dinosaurs and lizards roam the banks.

Before Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise, museum visitors are told, all of the dinosaurs were peaceable plant-eaters. The evidence is found in Genesis 1:30, where God gives “green herb” to every creature to eat. There were no predators. T-Rex had such big teeth, the museum explains, so it could open coconuts. Only after Adam and Eve sinned and were cast out of paradise did the dinosaurs start to eat flesh. And Adam’s sin is a key component of the belief system, for in the eyes of many creationists, in order for Jesus’ death to be meaningful it had to atone for Adam’s first sin.

[snip]

The movement desperately needs the imprint of science to legitimize itself. It achieves this imprint by discrediting real science and claiming creationist science as true science. All attempts to argue the creationists out of their mythical belief, to persuade them with logic, evidence, scientific inquiry and fact, will fail. They have created a “fundamentalist science.” They know they cannot return to the pre-Darwinian innocence that let them believe the Bible alone was enough. They need, in the midst of their flight from reality, to reassure their followers that science, science not contaminated by secular humanists and nonbelievers, is on their side. In this they are a distinctly modern movement. They seek the imprint of science and scholarship to legitimize myth. This is a characteristic they share with all modern totalitarian movements, which co-opt the disciplines of law, science, medicine and scholarship to give a modern veneer to their primitive and superstitious belief systems, systems that allow the rulers to dictate reality and truth. The “paraprofessional” organizations formed by the Christian right, organizations of teachers, journalists, doctors, lawyers and scientists, mimic the activities of real professional groups. They seek to challenge the legitimacy and the power of the traditional organizations. The duplication of the structures and methods employed by the non-totalitarian world, the use of pseudo-science to dress up fantasy, is slowly undermining our legitimate scientific and educational institutions. It is destroying the foundations of our open society. It is ushering us into a world where lies are true.

Others are saying the coconut theory about T-Rex is false, but all dinosaurs ate green herbs in Eden until Eve fucked it all up.

To counterbalance the Creation Science Museum opening, send P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula ideas for his Creation Museum Carnival.

Tengrain from Mock Paper Scissors and I posted on this 'museum' earlier. They posed light-skin colored children in clothes up to their chins near a velociraptor.

Green herbs indeed.

(update: fixed grammar and added link)

For those of us who are evolving

And intend to keep doing so, an excellent dismantling of the creationist's 'arguments':

Evolution: What You Need To Know:

• "Hey, it's only a theory..."
• Human beings are not the ultimate result of evolution
• Human beings are not descended from gorillas or chimpanzees
• Doesn't "Survival of the fittest" mean it's good for the strong to destroy the weak?
• Creatures do not decide how to evolve
• Species do not spontaneously change into new species
• Complex organs such as eyes can evolve gradually
• Creatures are not colourful just to please God
• Don't I have to give up belief in God if I accept evolution?
• Further reading

Atheists are unable to feel sympathy, horror, or love

Or any other emotion. PZ Myers at Pharyngula takes Dinesh D'Souza's bizarre claims about the absence of atheists after the Virginia Tech shooting and shreds it to pieces:

Start with the title: "Dawkins' Message to Mourners--Get Over It!". That sounds as if he is reporting that Dawkins has said something horribly callous directly to the grieving families, doesn't it? Well, no … all we actually have in this article from Richard Dawkins is a quote from his book, River Out of Eden^{(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll)}, published in the mid-90s.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Which is all quite true; I don't see the universe rising up to offer consolation to the families who have lost people they loved, or even better, magically blocking the bullets that have caused so much pain. I also don't see Dawkins offering this unpleasant fact of reality as funeral oratory, much less telling the families to "get over it."

So D'Souza has concocted an article entirely out of a lie. Is anyone surprised?

[snip]

After bumbling his way through more hateful stereotypes, D'Souza closes with a question.

I really want to hear what the atheist would tell the grieving mothers.

Hmmm. Something like, "I'm sorry. I wish I could help you bear your loss. Is there anything I can do to help?"

You know, some expression of regret and commisseration, and an offer of a shoulder to lean on. Like any other decent human being would.

Something D'Souza would find unfamiliar.

300

PZ Myers of Pharyngula points out the obvious: it is not pro or anti-war, it shows the fight between evolutionists and creationists!:

Look at the beginning. It's all about how the Spartans are the products of intense selection; the weak are culled from birth through adulthood, resulting in a collection of perfect physical specimens … exactly like all evolutionists. Unlike the real world, where our modesty compels us to conceal our awesome physiques beneath our lab coats, in the movie the Spartan products of evolution proudly expose their muscular pectorals, washboard abs, and snugly cupped packages. The Spartan women are also fierce and beautiful, like all evolutionist women. If everyone only accepted evolution, they too could look so ruggedly handsome (←note clever 'framing', in which I appeal to layperson's machismo and vanity).

*ahem* /fans face ... now I really have to go watch this movie....

The misuse of the word 'proof'

When arguing with a scientist will not help and will immediately expose you as a moron.

Finney, a Maryville Republican, said he wants the department to say there's no scientific proof for the theory of evolution and to let schools teach creationism or intelligent design.

That is a fundamental misconception, and one I wish we could somehow hammer into these gomers' heads. There is no scientific proof of anything…proof isn't something scientists deal with at all. It's an inappropriate demand in several ways.

• It singles out evolution, but as I said, there is no scientific proof of anything. Why not question cell theory or electromagnetism?
• If Finney is going to demand "proof", where's the proof for creationism or intelligent design? He's awfully inconsistent.
• The word Finney is actually looking for is not "proof", but "evidence". Evidence is what we look for in science classes. There is evidence for evolution; there is none for creationism or intelligent design. Case closed.