Another reminder that Republicans don’t have a monopoly on offensive anti-science stupidity, from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who declares algebra useless in a column directed at a high-school drop-out. If, say, the school asked you for another year of English or, God forbid, history, so that you actually had to know something about your […]
Category: War On Science
Physics Blog Notes
There was an article about physics blogs a little while back in Physics World, that didn’t mention me by name, but did link to the Steelypips site. It mostly talks up the informal information exchange side of things. In that spirit, here are some things I found via physics blog (mostly through Mixed States (after […]
It’s Turtles All the Way Down
I’ve occasionally joked in the past that it’s unfair that the biologists get all the attention from the religious wing nuts. I mean, modern cosmology ought to be just as big an affront to the young-earth creationist types as evolution, so what are we, chopped liver? Of course, now that a story has come to […]
Show Me the Pony
Though the tagline promises politics in addition to physics and pop culture, I try to keep the political content to a minimum. Not because I’m particularly worried about offending anyone, but because I don’t particularly like the way I sound when I write about politics these days. I get very cranky, and even if I […]
Accentuate the Positive
Via Kieran Healy an example of the happy coexistence of science and religion: The Vatican Observatory. I particularly like Kieran’s comment regarding the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope: I think that’s just fantastic–like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve […]
Libertopia Approaches?
The big news in physics yesterday was the announcement that a private donation has been made to support experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island. This is the accelerator that’s slamming gold nuclei into each other to create a quark-gluon plasma, along with a million dippy stories about how it might make […]
“Breathtaking Inanity” Would Be a Great Album Title
I’m probably just about the last science blogger on Earth to note this, but the Dover Panda Trial decision was handed down today, and it’s a doozy. I particularly like the summation: Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred […]