{"id":5931,"date":"2011-12-08T18:12:24","date_gmt":"2011-12-08T18:12:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/08\/links-for-2011-12-08\/"},"modified":"2011-12-08T18:12:24","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T18:12:24","slug":"links-for-2011-12-08","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/08\/links-for-2011-12-08\/","title":{"rendered":"Links for 2011-12-08"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/www.tor.com\/blogs\/2011\/12\/catching-up-to-the-future-an-appreciation-of-william-gibson?utm_source=Feedburner%3A+Frontpage+Partial+RSS+Feed&#038;utm_medium=feed&#038;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Torcom%2FFrontpage_Partial+%28Tor.com+Frontpage+Partial+-+Blog+and+Stories%29'>Catching Up To the Future: An Appreciation of William Gibson | Tor.com<\/a>\n<p>William Gibson is one of those writers whose name is in the process of becoming an adjective&#8211;consider Kafkaesque, Ballardian, Pynchonesque: words for which the meaning has become osmotically absorbed even by people who haven&#8217;t necessarily read the authors&#8217; books. Now we have Gibsonesque (or perhaps &#8220;Gibsonian&#8221;? The jury remains out). As with all such things, it&#8217;s not necessarily easy to define&#8211;if it was, we wouldn&#8217;t have needed to adjective-ize the name to begin with.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/www.grantland.com\/story\/_\/id\/7323875\/a-solution-bcs'>Vishnu Parasuraman on the problems with the BCS &#8211; Grantland<\/a>\n<p>[A]fter the BCS was released with Alabama ranked second, a whole new set of questions arose. Were quality wins more important than quality losses? Should a rematch be played? Should a team that couldn&#8217;t even win its own conference play for the national championship? In the midst of this dialogue, a separate debate raged over whether the BCS should be abolished in favor of a playoff. Most people support a playoff with some form of the BCS formula used to determine eligibility and seeding. Others want the BCS to remain intact. But all these debates miss the fundamental problem &#8212; the current BCS formula is a heavily flawed disaster. This formula came very close to destroying the fa\u00c3\u00a7ade of the BCS this year and represents a ticking time bomb waiting to explode on college football.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/contemplativemammoth.wordpress.com\/2011\/12\/06\/how-to-argue-with-a-scientist-a-guide\/'>How to argue with a scientist: A guide \u00c2\u00ab The Contemplative Mammoth<\/a>\n<p>I notice it all the time- on Facebook, in the comments of a science blog, over family gatherings, or listening to a radio talk show. Someone, maybe you, is patiently trying to explain how vaccines cause autism, perhaps, or why so-called &#8220;anthropogenic&#8221; global warming is really just due to sunspots or some other natural cycle. Perhaps you are doing pretty well at first, making use of passionate, heart-felt rhetoric and well-timed anecdotes. People are nodding their heads in agreement, and perhaps you&#8217;re even changing someone&#8217;s mind. And then a scientist joins the discussion. The conversation tends to devolve from here, turning into a debate and (often) ultimately a debacle. Scientists are notoriously difficult to argue with- for one, they&#8217;re so sure they&#8217;re right! [&#8230;] What makes it especially frustrating to argue with a scientist is the jargon they use; if you don&#8217;t speak their language, you&#8217;re probably not going to change their mind.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2011\/12\/07\/confused-rhode-island-christianists-sing-secular-song-to-defend-pagan-symbol\/'>slacktivist \u00c2\u00bb Confused Rhode Island Christianists sing secular song to defend Pagan symbol<\/a>\n<p>Hearing that, the good Christian people of Rhode Island realized that Chafee was right. Their Bibles, after all, don&#8217;t say anything at all about Christmas trees &#8212; a pre-Christian symbol from Pagan celebrations later adopted and syncretized into a Christian holiday &#8212; but those Bibles do have a great deal to say about feeding the needy. So &#8230; No, I&#8217;m kidding. Of course that&#8217;s not what happened. Chafee&#8217;s &#8220;holiday tree&#8221; gave these Christianists an excuse to pretend they&#8217;re being persecuted and nothing delights them more than a chance to pretend they&#8217;re being persecuted.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2011\/12\/07\/BA1D1M99V5.DTL'>&#8216;Mythbusters&#8217; cannonball hits Dublin home, minivan<\/a>\n<p>The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m., authorities said. There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all &#8211; only awakening because of plaster dust.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Catching Up To the Future: An Appreciation of William Gibson | Tor.com William Gibson is one of those writers whose name is in the process of becoming an adjective&#8211;consider Kafkaesque, Ballardian, Pynchonesque: words for which the meaning has become osmotically absorbed even by people who haven&#8217;t necessarily read the authors&#8217; books. Now we have Gibsonesque&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/12\/08\/links-for-2011-12-08\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Links for 2011-12-08<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links_dump","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}