This morning I went to see the third installment of the Shrek movies. It was a 10 a.m. dollar show at a dying mall. As the escalator lifted me from the bowels of parking, my ears were assaulted by all manner of high pitched vocalizations. Apparently, every summer day care…
Today we biked over to see the 2½ hour long gay pride parade. "You're here, you're queer, we're used to it." About 40,000 other people came to see the parade along the edge of my neighborhood today. You can see the crowds looking down Grand Boulevard. Many people were festively…
I was surprised yesterday to find a post by Jerry Pournelle (well known SF author and technology columnist) on MensNewsDaily (a starkly conservative news magazine site with pretensions of middle-of-the-roadism). His column, Intelligent Design: Answers and Questions, is openly favorable to the premise that Intelligent Design and Global Warming denial…
Why, we all wonder, is America alone among the "First World Nations" to have such a high proportion of science-denying religionists, and even in high offices? According to Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman in Why the Gods Are Not Winning (that I found via this summary by Pharyngula) religiosity is…
In brief, Stephen Jay Gould proposed the idea that evolution is truly stochastic (a particular technical kind of random), that if we started evolution over as of a million years ago, we probably wouldn't be here in our current form. That is, any evolutionary step is contingent on the history…