Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: Zoology/Hair Styling dept.

Not sure how to describe this, so I won’t.  Click for yourself.  Think of it as my “nature red in tooth and bang” post, in honor of the looming Darwin web orgy. Wierdly, I stumbled upon the image  in the context of a google image search for “Albert Einstein.” Tricky things, these intertubes.

Albert Einstein and the Political Implications of Sockless Activism

Over at Balloon Juice, new co-blogger DougJ has hit on the Washington Village People™ for their obsession with spurious class/”real people” markers.  His target, the notion that “doesn’t wear socks” is a useful shorthand for measuring the clueless/pseud function level fo someone.  See this post and the follow-up here.* Of course, there is a history-of-science [...]

On the Origin of Science Writing: Joseph Priestley/Isaac Newton edition

Sunday over at Daily Kos, Devilstower had a very nice review of Steven Johnson’s new biography of Joseph Priestley, The Invention of Air. The review did its job — make me go out and get the book. That said, Devilstower made one claim that I think dramatically overstates Priestley’s accomplishments — while diminishing the real [...]

More (If More Were Needed) To Explain Why Friends Don’t Let Friends Do ID

Update: Parts two and three of Ken’s demolition of the Discovery Institute’s Luskin can be found here and here.  At the end of the third piece, Miller discusses why he feels compelled to re-destroy Luskin, Behe and the ID movement’s attempt to re-try the Dover case. His answer is that the Dover case was such [...]

Belated New Year’s Fun: Star Wars, Programming Poetry, MIT folks with too much time on their hands Dept.

For a bravura display of fandom, quirky programming chops, and a genuinely distinctive sense of the form and future of poetry, check out my esteemed, and occasionally obsessive colleague Nick Montfort‘s New Year’s Poem.  It’s an animated retelling of Star Wars, Ep. IV (the real first one to those of us of a certain age.) [...]