Science/Technology blog

Although the Bush Administration has already proven itself pretty effective at interfering with science and regulation through existing channels, yesterday’s New York Times reports that this wasn’t quite enough:

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

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I am so glad to see that conversations started face-to-face at the Science Blogging Conference are now continuing online (see the bottom of the ever-growing linkfests here and here). While some are between science bloggers, as expected, others are between people who have never heard of each other before and who came from very different angles and with different interests. The cross-fertilization we hoped for is happening!

See, for instance, what a casual chat over lunch at the Conference did to David Warlick - made him think about education and about online technologies from a - new to David - perspective of someone who watches the way scientists think:

…He said that science used to be reductionist in nature. I asked what that meant, and he said that science was about drilling down to components, cutting out and examining bits of the world, reducing it to its barest fundamentals. He said that the younger scientists spend more time synthesizing, that they seem much more interested in systems and networks, not so much how things operate independently, but how they operate as part of a larger organism, ecosystem, or cosmos.

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The development of hydrogen fuel cells for cars has been described as the “ultimate green dream” in transportation.

But the high expense of producing an efficient cell has waned efforts to transform this technology into a common source of energy for vehicles.

Now, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have put a new spin on some old technology and are making important strides towards building a more efficient and less expensive hydrogen fuel cell.

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I always find it a bit amusing when someone who is exceptionally good at identifying (and mercilessly mocking) stupidity in certain circumstances turns out to be totally oblivious to his own stupidity. That’s exactly the case when it comes to Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame). He’s gone off the deep end when it comes to evolution before, and now he’s at it again. I’m not going to try to identify all of the problems with his latest attempt. Instead, I’ll just pick a couple of the more spectacularly stupid remarks.

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At the risk of irritating a fellow ScienceBlogger again, I thought I’d point out this little post forwarded to me by Norm Jenson as yet another example of exactly the inflated hype for dichloroacetate as a “cure for cancer” that will “never see the light of day” because it has little profit potential (and, by the way, that pharmaceutical companies will “probably lobby against it with all their might”) that I was talking about in my original post on the subject.

I should have taken a Read the rest of this entry »

Teaching Carnival #19 is up on Scribblingwoman

The 104th Carnival of Education is up on The Median Sib

57th Carnival of Homeschooling is up on PalmTree Pundit

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…handle the Truth?

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Walter ReMine (an anti-evolutionist who ardently believes that “Haldane’s Dilemma” is a real problem for evolution) recently updated the entry for “Haldane’s Dilemma” at the CreationWiki. The update does not directly refer to my recent posts on the topic, but does address the points that I made. Actually, “address” is probably the wrong word - he provides a hand-waving dismissal without actually responding to any of the specific points I raised. Ordinarily, a hand-waving response isn’t worth the effort needed to write a reply, but in this case the errors that ReMine makes are worth discussing simply because they provide a convenient jumping-off point for a discussion of the way evolution actually works.

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Neil de Grasse Tyson on The Daily Show now.

He is very good. Jon is on form also.

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Dave Ng and his loyal readers are are propagating their own viral version of the Truth, using a Google bomb campaign to climb Google’s search rankings. It’s not as nefarious as it sounds:

Currently, the Truth is #30 in the Google search rankings, up from #300 a week ago. With a little help from you, it could be #1.

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