Apparently, the US Air Forces wants to infect your computer with a trojan to use it if needed for cyberwarfare. You mean they haven’t done so already? Joshua Zelinksy looks at some of problems with their plans to create an army of zombie computers (yeah, sorry, zombie computers, not the other kind).

Update: OK, so I was wrong (see Joshua’s comment below), but it’s still a fun headline.

Matthew Linkletter, the Director of the Athens School Board, in Maine, has called for the local school administrative district to drop evolution from its high school science curricula.  Why?  Because it’s an “unprovable theory and shouldn’t be taught as fact”.  Ah, that tired old argument again.

Linkletter believes that neither evolution nor creationism belong in a high school science curriculum, because they cannot be proven.

Mike O’Risal takes an in-depth look at this over at Hyphoid Logic: part 1, and part 2.  The issue here isn’t just one more creationist spouting nonsense and broadcasting their cluelessness.  Problems like this need to be addressed before they turn into big fights.  After all, those who suffered most in the Kitzmiller case were the people of Dover, Pennsylvania.  Mike writes:

When the argument in Florida was going on, one of the first rumblings was at the county level, when some members of the Polk County school board led the way in putting forth a resolution objecting to the state’s new science education standards. That’s not unlike what’s happening right now in Maine. In the case of Polk County, the Creationists backed down when people got involved and let them know that they were under the microscope. In Florida, there’s a hugely influential, well-funded, centralized fundamentalist church and a whole lot of its adherents in state government. Maine isn’t the same situation in that regard, but it should not be taken for granted that what has happened elsewhere couldn’t happen in northern New England. Just as was done in Polk County, people need to let Matthew Linkletter and Roy Blevins and whoever else needs to know that the eyes of the rational world are upon them. The best time to treat cancer is when the tumor is just a few cells. Leave it untreated and it will spread. That principle needs to be applied to School Administrative District 59 in Maine, too. Some contact information, and links to more, are provided in this entry.

So far, he has been unable to get this on the radar.  His first post, on May 6 (which I completely missed) seems not to have attracted much attention.  But this is the kind of issue that really needs to have someone shine some light on it.

A sign, apparently, from a real protest against the Beijing Olympics.

It’s one thing to forget history and Jesse Owens‘ victories in the Berlin Olympics in 1936. But haven’t they seen Contact?

H/T Ed Brayton.

James McGrath has a must-read post: “No One Believes That The God Of The Bible Exists Anymore“

No one confronts the representatives of another tradition with a contest to see which one’s deity will send fire from heaven as Elijah did. No Christian blogger claims that those who comment negatively will be struck with blindness for doing so, as apostles did. God is depicted in many parts of the Bible as knocking down city walls, parting seas and so on. Yet no Christian dominionists are likely to march around Washington D.C. and see it fall into their hands.

And it gets better from there.

I missed the first anniversary of this blog (I imported an older blog, so the archives actually go back to 2004, but I started here on April 24, 2007.

Missing your own blog’s birthday. Talk about pathetic.

An Op-Ed in the Boston Globe by Ken Miller expresses that concern:

AMERICAN science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein’s new movie, “Expelled,” is helping to push it along.

I believe that American culture has a deep vein of anti-intellectualism, and the current anti-science movement has roots that go back at least to the “Reagan revolution”. It’s a multi-pronged attack - there’s astroturfing by big business (acid rain, smoking, climate change), there was the “property rights vs. science” battle that was lost in the West in the 1990s, and there’s the battle against the creationists. Sadly they have fed one upon the other - big business showed that scientific opinion is for sale (and if some scientists are for sale, then maybe all are, right?) The property rights issue managed to cast science as just another interest group. The creationists built on both of these ideas - they bought their own scientists, cast real science as just another ideologically-driven lobby, and then asked for “fairness” and “equal time”. Expelled is, of course, part of the next step - demonise science and scientists.

Expelled is a slick propaganda piece, full of outright lies. Miller continues

Why is all this nonsense a threat to science? The reason is Stein’s libelous conclusion that science is simply evil…Stein is doing nothing less than helping turn a generation of American youth away from science. If we actually come to believe that science leads to murder, then we deserve to lose world leadership in science. In that sense, the word “expelled” may have a different and more tragic connotation for our country than Stein intended.

My hope is that Stein has overplayed his hand when he said that science leads to murder. But most of the people he may have reached with the movie will never any of Stein’s more outrageous nonsense.

While I have read some of the people at ScienceBlogs on a daily basis for months, I still have not plumbed the depths of what’s available in terms of good reading.  I recently came across Shifting Baselines, a good ecology/conservation biology blog written by Jennifer Jacquet, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia, Josh Donlan, a conservation scientist at Cornell and Randy Olson, the creator of A Flock of Dodos.

In January, Jacquet discussed a study which looked at replacing fishmeal (which is used to feed chickens, pigs and fish) with “bugmeal”.  Working with striped bass, researchers at Mississippi State University found that the fish readily took the “bugmeal” and the final product was similar to fishmeal raised fish, but had a less “fishy” smell (which is considered a bonus by American consumers).  Today she presented some response to questions she asked Lou D’Abramo, the lead scientist on the Mississippi State project.

The first question really gets to the heart of the problem of our industrial food production system: what are the insects raised on? The answer - grain, probably corn.  Lovely.  Fortunately, D’Abramo seems to be aware of the problem with that, and discussed the idea of raising them on fish wastes.  He also talked about raising insects on waste products to alter their fatty acid profile - something that wouldn’t have have been the least bit surprising had I read that with my aquarist brain switched on…you read a lot about fatty acid profiles in the context of getting your Corydoras to breed.  (I should do a less good job of compartmentalisation.)

Finding a substitute for fish meal is a good thing.  Insects sound like a good substitute.  But our industrial system of agriculture just makes things like this awfully complicated - needlessly complicated.  Small farmers feeding fish on grubs or mealworms raised on locally generated waste sounds workable.  Industrial-scale “bugmeal” production, on the other hand, raises the usual problems of energy demands, transport, and waste production.  One step forward, but we’re on a conveyor belt running us backward…

Hillary Clinton’s victory speech in Indiana sounds more like a farewell speech.  While she affirms that she is going on to West Virginia and Kentucky (two states she’ll win easily), this feels different from her other speeches.  Actually I like this Hillary a lot better than the one I’ve heard recently.

This isn’t a concession speech, but there’s finally an awareness of the reality of the situation.  Nice speech.

Titan at Promethus Retold has an interesting analysis of Jana McCreary published in the Southwestern University Law Review. McCreary makes the argument that evolution is a creation story for atheism (disputable, but beside the point), thus teaching evolution fails the Lemon Test - that the teaching of evolution advances on religion (atheism). According to Titan, McCreary then goes on to suggest that to counter this, government should mandate the teaching of creationism.

I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that if something violates the law, the solution to the problem is not more violation of the law. As Titan puts it

If teaching evolution really violates the First Amendment, then we should stop teaching it.

That’s all. If you believe that teaching evolution violates the law by furthering one religion, the solution isn’t to argue for more law-breaking. That’s chaos, that’s vigilante justice. But that isn’t the way the law works. Even I know that much.

Titan goes on to argue that even if evolution supports one religious viewpoint over another, there’s no violation of the law because the primary purpose of teaching evolution is not to advance a religious viewpoint. Personally I find it more amusing to imagine what would happen if any law supportive of religion were found to violate the First Amendment. Murder is prohibited by most religions, as is incest. Most religions invoke a universal moral code which is present in our laws - which themselves derive, I suspect, from Roman and Germanic laws meant to further their religions.

It quickly becomes ridiculous. Which may, in fact, be the underlying point of the argument - if declaring laws which advance religion unconstitutional, the entire Lemon Test should be thrown out. And that, of course, might allow the teaching of creationism.

H/T Tim Sandefur at PT.

As I’m sure everyone has seen already, a federal judge in New York issued an injunction against Premise Media, instructing them not to “distribute” Expelled any further.  Apparently they can continue to show the film in cinemas, but they cannot send out new prints or distribute DVDs.  Ed Brayton and Wes Elsberry have details.

People were right - it’s one thing to mess with small startups (or big universities).  It’s quite another thing to mess with Yoko Ono.  Of course, unlike the XVIVO issue (where the infringement seems pretty clear), the use of 26 seconds of “Imagine” in the movie seems to be a far weaker case.  I’m all for liberal fair use laws in principle, but the way they used the song (Imagine there’s no Heaven, over pictures of Nazis and Stalinists) is more than just a copyright infringement - it has the ability to fundamentally change the way that people see the song.  It’s unlikely - but then, isn’t that who Freddie Mercury thought when he first heard “Ice, Ice Baby“?  (Not that “Under Pressure” was a great song or anything, but whenever I hear that base line, I think Vanilla Ice, quicker than I think Queen.)

The fact that the judge was willing to issue the injunction suggests to me that there’s a case there.  Of course, if could also just reflect the fact that Yoko can afford top-notch lawyers.  Who knows.  Even if she wins, all it will mean is that they’ll have to edit out change a few seconds of music.  It won’t stop Expelled from being used as a propaganda tool…