Archive for July, 2008
How To Scare Consumers
I was scanning the Reuters science news and saw this story on nano-foods.
ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – Those consumers already worried about genetically engineered or cloned food reaching their tables may soon find something else in their grocery carts to furrow their brows over — nano-foods.
What a great way to introduce new technology to the masses, eh? OH NOEZ! DEY R GUNNA PUT NANOZ IN UR FOODZ!
Nano-technology is simply any technology that manipulates something on the molecular level. If you alter or add anything on that scale, it can be called nano-technology. Consumer product labs have been adding chemicals and additives to our food for years we rarely make a fuss. This is the exact same thing except on a much smaller scale. Its like deciding to use nano-technology to add fluoride to the water instead of the current technologies.
The worst parts however are the articles use of nano-scare tactics to address consumer’s fear of cloned animal products and their interviewee, Michael Hansen, who raises a complete non sequitur regarding the harmful inhalation of nano-sized particles and the use of nano-technology to engineer safer and healthier foods.
Sigh… why do I even read the news anymore?
Via: Reuters
Social Networking For Scientists
Labmeeting is a new social network geared at letting scientists share and discuss research that publicly opened its doors last week to anyone with a college e-mail account. Labmeeting can be seen first and foremost as a document management site that allows students and scientists to upload, search, annotate and share their growing collection of documents as well as follow what documents their colleagues are collecting.
Scientists aren’t exactly known for being the most social of people. Perhaps this kind of online networking can help bridge the gap between hardcore science and social interaction.
Via: TechCrunch
Happy Birthday, NASA!
50 years ago today, The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act.
NASA began operations on October 1, 1958, with a staff of 80 spread among four laboratories. The agency now consists of 15 facilities that employed more than 17,000 people in 2006.
Happy birthday, NASA! I wish you all the best in the years and missions to come.
A Reasonable Alien Discussion
After Apollo 14 astronaut Ed Mitchell went on record as believing in alien visitations to Earth, its nice to know our other astronauts have not lost the ability to think rationally. Mark Kelly, the U.S. commander of space shuttle Discovery, briefly discussed the topic during a Tokyo news conference.
We have seen some evidence that there is a possibility of some life on Mars in the past, so there is probably life all over the universe.
From our experience, it is very difficult to travel through space, and I personally think aliens have not visited our planet.
The Discovery recently delivered Japan’s Kibo orbital laboratory to the International Space Station in June.
Via: Reuters
NOVA Offers ‘Open Content’
For their newest program, Car of the Future, NOVA and PBS have decided to try and get the public involved by making more than 200 raw, unedited video clips available online for everyone in hopes that they will fuel creativity and foster a sharing of ideas. The clips include expert interviews and a variety of scenic shots.
The videos are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported so there are only a few restrictions on what you can do with them.
Food For Thought
Sir David Attenborough on the Orangutan
It makes me wonder why we don’t have more large-scale facilities designed to study and possibly facilitate this kind of behavior.
Crazy Christian Campaign Comic
It would seem Oklahoma Commissioner Brent Rinehart is going all out in an attempt to get re-elected county commissioner. He’s even gone as far as mailing out his campaign manifesto in the form of a comic. Sounds like a great idea until you discover Rinehart is a fundamentalist bigot who wants to impose his Christian sense of morality on everyone else. He also seems to be wholly obsessed with the gay sex.
Rinehart says the comic strip took him two months to script out and is “more or less a story of my experiences of the last four years of being the county commissioner of District 2.” No one seems to have noted how long it took Shane Suiters to pen the 16 page masterpiece.
Keith Gaddie, a University of Oklahoma political science professor, called the book “one of the strangest things” he’d ever seen.
“I’ve never seen a comic book with the phrase ‘anal sodomy’ in it before. That was a new one for me.”
Regardless of my personal feelings about this ass-obsessed clown, I’m not knocking Rinehart’s comic book approach at all. Far from it, I think its a novel idea that can have excellent results when done politely and with an actual sense of humor, like Kansas pro-education, pro-science candidate Sean Tevis did for his campaign.
Download Brent Rinehart’s full campaign comic here.
Via: The Freethinker, Tulsa World
Here Be Dragons
Brian Dunning has created a 40-minute video introduction to critical thinking called Here Be Dragons based on his excellent Skeptoid podcast.
Most people fully accept paranormal and pseudoscientific claims without critique as they are promoted by the mass media. Here Be Dragons offers a toolbox for recognizing and understanding the dangers of pseudoscience, and appreciation for the reality-based benefits offered by real science.
Here Be Dragons is suitable for general audiences and is licensed for free distribution and public display. Go download your own copy or purchase a DVD at the Here Be Dragons website.
My SciAm Horoscope
The folks over at Scientific American had a little fun and came up with… umm, I mean, “divined” a collection of amusing horoscopes for the August 2008 issue. Here’s mine.
Aries: Your attempt to clone your dog Binky based on the hope that Binky 2 will know where “original” Binky hid the leather wallet he took off your end table and hid for the last time just before he died of distemper betrays your utter ignorance of both cloning and Binky’s deeply malevolent nature.
Now go read yours.
Via: Scientific American
It’s Hard Being A Liberal
Roy Zimmerman tells us just how hard it is from his album Thanks for the Support.
I’d like to say I can relate to some of this. But at the present moment, I can’t afford to.
Via: Pharyngula
The Great Desecration Is Over
Well, PZ has finally done the deed. The Great Desecration of 2008 has ended and no one was struck down by almighty lightning.
If you haven’t kept up with the story, A parishioner in a Florida Catholic church accepted the holy Eucharist but did not ingest it. Apparently, he was planning to leave service with the holy Eucharist still in his possession. Some local church groups threw a big fit and the local news covered it. Then PZ Myers of Pharyngula noticed the story and posted a scathing rebuttal to the notion that everyone should hold these wafers sacred. This caught the attention of Bill Donohue who, as head of the Catholic league, organized mass efforts to get PZ fired from the University of Minnesota, Morris, as well as many other Christian crazies who began filling PZ’s inbox with various threats ranging from his job to his life.
So what was the horrid act of desecration? …A nail. A dull rusty nail. To keep it fair however, PZ ran the nail through the Eucharist as well as torn pages from the Qur’an and The God Delusion.
And then he threw it all into the garbage.
Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanities’ knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.
Well said, PZ. Well said.
I’m Afraid Of Never Having Lived
PZ pointed me to an interesting essay about the craziness that was ‘World Youth Day’ in Sydney, Australia. One particular passage stuck out at me while I read.
It’s been a revelation to me a year since my “epiphany”. I feel as if I’m walking through life with the blinkers off. Suddenly all the religious mumbo-jumbo jumps out as so bonkers. Wearing certain things, eating certain things, mumbling certain things at certain times so some imaginary friend will let you into a club in the sky when you die. I want to do my living now, thanks. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of never having lived.
A somewhat simple but acurate description of what it feels like to view the world anew without the blindfold of religion over your eyes or as Julia Sweeney put it in her show ‘Letting Go of God’, “Taking off the God glasses.” When you believe in religion, you have to live a double life. One where all your judgments are based on evidence and rational thought and another where you allow supernatural explanations to creep into existence and faith trumps evidence. Since faith is basically a lack of evidence – if you have ample evidence, you don’t need faith – this presents two conflicting world views coexisting within the same mind. It’s no wonder why religious people are always having to reaffirm their beliefs and attend prepared revivals. When every other aspect of your life is driven by evidence, reason and critical thinking, the challenge in reconciling irrational beliefs becomes that much harder.
Via: Pharyngula
And This Is You Brain On Love
Helen Fisher and her team have spent the last few years studying the brain mechanisms responsible for love by putting various groups of people in various states of love into an MRI machine.
Though not very heavy on the science, this little talk does a nice job of opening up a lot of questions about the nature and evolutionary history of love and other complimentary emotions.
D’Sousa Is Being Honest For A Change
In his new Townhall.com article, Dinesh D’Souza has done something very unusual… He’s told the truth for a change.
In my debate with atheist Christopher Hitchens in New York last October he raised a point that I did not know how to answer. So I employed an old debating strategy: I ignored it and answered other issues.
Now, to be truthful, Dinesh D’Souza is a very intelligent individual. His rhetoric is fantastic and the intensity he applies to his arguments bring a breath of life into the Creationist fold. However, at the core, his actual arguments generally fall short.
As noted above from his own mouth, Dinesh likes to employ the “redefine the subject” tactic to debating. This tactic is to simply redefine and shift the point of the argument into something that he can argue against. Indeed, D’Souza does this on the larger scale as well, employing this method to generate new reincarnations of old arguments. Lately, D’Souza has taken a fancy to the classic “fine-tuned universe” argument which is nothing but the “Argument from Design” shifted from the biological to the cosmic scale. Basically, Since creationists can’t show that life forms on Earth are intelligently designed (indeed, they appear to be more un-intelligently than intelligently designed), they step back and say that it’s the universe itself that is intelligently designed. This makes one ask in exactly what other kind of universe would we be around to pose that question in the first place? We, as humans, apply numeric values to the ‘fine tuning’ variables of the universe. Who’s to say that these values aren’t the only way there is? Is it not possible that, like the speed of light, these values simply don’t have the luxury of fluctuating?
Back to the linked article above, D’Souza simply runs and hides behind the semantics of linguistics and redefinitions of the core argument yet again.
Via: Townhall.com
The Moon Transits The Earth
EPOXI, the repurposed and renamed Deep Impact spacecraft, turned back towards Earth last May and captured images of the Moon passing by. Don Lindler put together an animation (below) of the entire transit.
Wow… Just, wow.
Via: Bad Astronomy
