For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials.
World Press Photo has announced its winning photos for 2009. These photos have traditionally been politically relevant and emotionally powerful--incredibly compelling images. They are often as rich in imagery as they are disturbing in content.
This video is a couple years old, but it makes a worthy point for those of us who sometimes get weary of hearing how foolish and vile we are when we are accused of these things by people who don't even know us.
Once again the orchids are on display at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I snapped some photos or these incredible beings. After all, they are our cousins. Richard Dawkins estimates that animals diverged from the plant kingdom about two billion years ago.
I've written previously about Darwin's fascination with orchids here. For today, I will simply paste in a few new photos of these incredibly beautiful plants. I've posted many more of my photos of today's show at one of my public web albums at Picasa.
P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula reported on an invitation sent to University of Vermont biology Professor Nicholas Gotelli, as well as Gotelli's crisp response. Here's a piece of professor Gotelli's response:
Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.
Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish.