Donal: Is Occupy Over?
Ramona's Piece de la Resistance (Including Pics of Obama, Romney, FDR)
dagblog To Give Away Logoed Hairshirt To Most Effective Lamenter Of Left's Ineptitude
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Giving Mega Shark his due
by Nebton 2/22/2010 - 2:14 pm
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Recently, it came to my attention that a fellow nerd has gone to the trouble of calculating some statistics behind MegaShark's dramatically captured attack on an airplane. Here's a small version of his info-graphic (I encourage you to visit the blog itself as it has additional details):
Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron give away free copies of Origin of Species
In an odd turn of events, Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron are giving away free copies of Origin of Species. No, this is not satire. What's the catch? Well, Comfort has added an introduction where he presumably explains why Darwin's theory is all nonsense. [Read more]
Barbara Boxer shows how it's done
The US Senate has many rules not codified in the Constitution. The most famous of these rules is the fillibuster. As was made clear by the threat of the "nuclear option" when Democrats were threatening to fillibuster judicial appointments, these rules are more guidelines than hard and fast laws. They are usually followed, but they don't have to be. [Read more]
When is sexual discrimination wrong?
by Nebton 9/25/2009 - 11:24 am
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I know, your first thought is ALWAYS. Bear with me, however, as I examine the edge cases. What qualifies as an edge case will vary from person to person, I imagine.
Starting with the most extreme case that is so extreme it's hard to imagine it being labeled as discrimination, consider our dating choices. Most of us (literally) discriminate on the basis of sex in those conditions, and almost no one would consider it wrong.
Moving slightly along this chain, we reach beauty contests. Some people have challenged sexual discrimination in these as well, but not too many find a problem with the sexual discrimation aspect inherent in almost all beauty contests. (That's not to say that they don't have other flaws being picked over.) [Read more]
Quantum Corner: Introduction
by Nebton 9/21/2009 - 10:52 am
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I'm hoping to start a fairly regular set of postings on Quantum Mechanics and/or other weird science that fascinates me. However, if there's no interest (after all, it's outside the normal scope of all things dagblog), I'll drop it. With that in mind, I thought I'd start with an overview of Quantum Mechanics, talk about how it's really weird, and give my interpretation of it, all without delving into math or jargon. Well, I'll try to at least save any such delving for the comments section.
For those who find QM confusing, I offer up these quotes:
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. - Niels Bohr [Read more]
The right to choose death
by Nebton 9/2/2009 - 2:01 pm
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Most of us here at Dagblog probably support a sane person's right to choose to terminate his/her life (although we would likely try to talk a friend/family member out of it if no sufferering was involved). What about those of questionable sanity? [Read more]
Cataloging political species
As much as I hate the over-simplification of the liberal/conservative dichotomy (which feeds into the "with us or against us" mentality), a discussion I had recently with a friend left me thinking about how we often not only use those distinctions, but also use finer grained distinctions that are equally misleading. (Specifically we were talking about how the free trade vs. protectionism discussions combines disparate camps from both sides.) [Read more]
Null fish
A while ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the concept of the "null fish". It's the atheists response to the Jesus fish. I know what you're thinking - don't we already have the FSM "fish", the Darwin fish, and the Evolve fish? Well, first of all the FSM fish technically advocates belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and I don't think you can be an atheist and believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'm pretty sure s/he qualifies as supernatural. As for the Darwin/Evolve fishes, they're not really particular to atheists, are they? I mean, several Christians et al. (and probably all regular Dagblog posters, regardless of religion) believe in evolution, don't they? [Read more]
Innocent until proven guilty? Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
by Nebton 7/15/2009 - 12:37 pm
Two phrases that get tossed around a bit are "Innocent until proven guilty" and "Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". Of course, these phrases are typically reserved for people we want to defend or people we don't want to believe could be guilty of the crime they're accused of. [Read more]
Obama disappoints, once again
by Nebton 6/19/2009 - 12:32 pm
Obama has disappointed many on the left time, and time again, from suppression of abuse/rape photos to giving amnesty to telcos over illegal wire-tapping, just to name a couple.
This time, however, he's crossed the line.
We want a President who wouldn't hurt a fly. Don't we? Well, maybe not all of us, but PETA does.
Although I'm a pescetarian, and am very sympathetic to many of PETA's causes, they really do like the crazy, don't they?
In the News
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WTF, Quebec?
Quebec student protesters find creative ways around controversial new law
Read the article at http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1181357--quebec-student-protesters-find-creative-ways-around-controversial-new-law- Add new comment
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Obamneybush Plans for Afghanistan
Perceptive Dagblog readers know the difference between Obama, Romney and Bush:
Obama NYT today: .how President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House....The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. “Well,” Mr. Obama responded that day, “I’m not going to give them more time.”...Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy...
Mitt Romney, Feb. 2012 : LAS VEGAS -- LAS VEGAS -- Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Wednesday night blasted President Obama and his administration for “putting in jeopardy” the nation’s military mission by signaling it hopes to end its combat mission in Afghanistan by the middle of 2013.
Appearing at a campaign rally here shortly after landing in Nevada, Romney said Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta’s statement Wednesday that U.S. forces would transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan next year “makes absolutely no sense.”....George W. Bush, from May, 2003: BBC - "We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide... Free nations will press on to victory,"
Bush Afghanistan strategy : Gen. Douglas E. Lute, who had spent the last two years of the Bush administration trying to manage the many trade-offs necessary as the Iraq war consumed troop and intelligence resources needed in Afghanistan, arrived with a PowerPoint presentation. The first slide that General Lute threw onto the screen caught the eye of Thomas E. Donilon, later President Obama’s national security adviser. “It said we do not have a strategy in Afghanistan that you can articulate or achieve,” Mr. Donilon recalled three years later. “We had been at war for eight years, and no one could explain the strategy.”
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Marco Rubio as VP: Bilderberg conspiracy
Mitt Romney isn’t very far into the vice presidential selection process. But according to a dedicated band of conspiracy theorists, the pick is all but a lock: Sen. Marco Rubio.
That’s the current thinking among a worldwide collection of activists who are obsessed with the secretive Bilderberg Group, an alternating roster of global power players who loom as large — if not larger — in the online fever swamps of the fringe as the Trilateral Commission or the Council on Foreign Relations.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html#ixzz1vN5egowzRead the article at http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/76518.html -
Why science needs wonder
Aristotle and Plato didn’t agree on much, but they were united in identifying wonder as the origin of their profession. As Aristotle said, “It is owing to their wonder that men . . . first began to philosophise.” This idea appeals to scientists, who frequently enlist wonder as a goad to inquiry. “I think everyone in every culture has felt a sense of awe and wonder looking at the sky,” wrote Carl Sagan in 1985, locating in this response the stirrings of a Copernican desire to know who and where we are.
Yet that is not the only direction in which wonder may take us. To Thomas Carlyle, wonder sits at the beginning not of science, but of religion. That is the central tension in forging an alliance of wonder with science: will it make us curious, or induce us to prostrate ourselves in pitiful ignorance? We had better get to grips with this question before we too hastily appropriate wonder to sell science. That is surely what is going on when pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope are (unconsciously?) cropped and coloured to recall the sublime iconography of Romantic landscape painting, or the Human Genome Project is wrapped in biblical rhetoric, or the Large Hadron Collider’s proton-smashing is depicted as “replaying the moment of creation”. The point is not that such things are deceitful or improper, but that if we want to take that path, we should first consider the complex evolution of the relation between science and wonder.
[....]
Pretending that science is performed by people who have undergone a Baconian purification of the emotions only deepens the danger that it will seem alien and odd to outsiders, something carried out by people who do not think as they do. Daston believes that we have inherited a “view of intelligence as neatly detached from emotional, moral and aesthetic impulses, and a related and coeval view of scientific objectivity that brand[s] such impulses as contaminants”. It is easy to understand the historical origins of this attitude: the need to distinguish science from credulous “enthusiasm”, to develop an authoritative voice, to strip away the pretensions of the mystical Renaissance magus who acquired knowledge through personal revelation. We no longer need these defences, however; worse, they become a defensive reflex that exposes scientists to the caricature of the emotionally constipated boffin, hiding within thickets of jargon.
Read the article at http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/sci-tech/2012/05/why-science-needs-wonder -
Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis
... We’re trying to harness photosynthesis. A key part of photosynthesis is what happens when the sun goes down. Cells convert CO2 into sugar and fat molecules. And they store the fat to burn as energy to get them through the night ... We’re trying to coax our synthetic cells to ... store far more fat than they actually were designed to do, so that we can harness it all as an energy source and use it to create gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel straight from carbon dioxide and sunlight. This would shift the carbon equation so we’re recycling CO2 instead of taking new carbon out of the ground and creating still more CO2. But it has to be done on a massive scale to have any real impact on the amount of CO2 we’re putting into the atmosphere, let alone recovering from the atmosphere.
... We envision facilities the size of San Francisco. And 10 or 15 of those in this country. We need sunlight, seawater, and non-agricultural land, but you need a lot of photons to drive this. You need a lot of surface area of sunlight to do that. It’s a great use for Arizona. Lots of sunlight there.
... If we can’t get some key scientific breakthroughs within the next couple of years, it probably won’t happen in 10 years. So it’s something that’s really dependent on fundamental science. But we’re already able to do things that were once seen as impossible.
... I think the new anti-intellectualism that’s showing up in politics today is a symptom of our not discussing these issues enough. We don’t discuss how our society is now 100 percent dependent on science for its future. We need new scientific breakthroughs—sometimes to overcome the scientific breakthroughs of the past. A hundred years ago oil sounded like a great discovery. You could burn it and run engines off it. I don’t think anybody anticipated that it would actually change the atmosphere of our planet. Because of that we have to come up with new approaches. We just passed the 7 billion population mark. In 12 years, we’re going to reach 8 billion. If we let things run their natural course, we’ll have massive pandemics, people starving. Without science I don’t see much hope for humanity.Read the article at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/mf_venter/2/
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