Booby Henderson, the founder of the Church of the FSM, has produced a book, The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He has decided to use the profits towards buying a missionary pirate ship to spread the word. There’s a petition you can sign to try and persudade the US government that the Church [...]
Posts tagged with ‘science’
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Mutants and the Dutch
2 January 2006 – 11:37 am
I recently read Mutants by Armand Marie Leroi, which is a book that uses mutation as a way of understanding the development of the body. It’s interesting but quite medical; I have a pretty high tolerance for stuff about chemical pathways, gene mutations, hormones and so on, but I still found all the polysyllabic chemical [...]
Orientalism and crying wolf
30 December 2005 – 5:36 pm
This blog-post on the Hwang debacle kind of annoyed me. As is probably obvious from what I said in the comments section. The relevant part of the post is this :
It sounds like there was nothing in the paper that should have given Hwang Woo-suk away; doubtless he faked the data to be believable. But [...]
Galileo satnav
28 December 2005 – 1:04 pm
The first satellite of Galileo, the EU’s competitor to GPS, was launched yesterday - initially to test out the kit, with the service planned to go online in 2010. One of the explicitly stated aims is provide independence from reliance on the US government, since GPS is a military system that is made available for [...]
Vatican Starman Slams ID!
20 November 2005 – 12:44 am
“The Vatican’s chief astronomer said on Friday that Intelligent Design Theory isn’t science and doesn’t belong in science classrooms.”
The ‘Vatican’s chief astronomer’? I wonder if CERN has a head priest who can be consulted for a theological perspective on particle physics.
I don’t suppose the Vatican astronomer is empowered to define the Catholic Church’s theological stance [...]
Singing Mice
1 November 2005 – 11:46 pm
This is a fabulous story, in the Guardian. Make sure you listen to the samples. The sound of singing mice doesn’t seem to freak out the cat, unlike slowed-down blackbird song. Via Metafilter.
[I couldn't get that blackbird link to work today - I don't know whether it's just a problem with my connection or a [...]
APOD does it again
21 October 2005 – 2:52 pm
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is often pretty cool, but even by their standards this one’s a doozy.
‘The Mating Mind’ by Geoffrey Miller
15 October 2005 – 3:47 pm
I’ve just read The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. The book’s argument is that many of the typical characteristics of human behaviour are best understood as products of sexual selection. Sexual selection is the process where you start with some ancestral bird species where the females have a bit [...]
Bad science reporting
26 September 2005 – 11:57 am
Ben Goldacre says (full article here):
There is one university PR department in London that I know fairly well - it’s a small middle-class world after all - and I know that until recently, they had never employed a single science graduate. This is not uncommon. Science is done by scientists, who write it up. Then [...]
‘The Ancestor’s Tale’ by Richard Dawkins
19 September 2005 – 3:15 pm
I’ve just read The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. The book traces back human descent to the earliest forms of life as a ‘pilgimage’, marking the points where other branches of our family tree ‘join’ us; the first rendezvous is with the chimps, then the other apes, then the rest of the primates and so [...]
Intelligent Design
21 August 2005 – 1:57 pm
God Chimes in on Intelligent Design. Creationism seems like such a soft target. It scares me silly that anyone takes it seriously.
this made me giggle
16 August 2005 – 8:34 am
From the New Scientist RSS feed:
‘Tenth planet’ may be bigger then expected
A space telescope used to place an upper limit on the object’s size was in fact pointing in the wrong direction