Great Britain is catching up to the U.S. when it comes to the rejection of evolution by natural selection. Consider the following from The Guardian: Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the…
It's not that I'm infatuated with the words of Potus44, but Barack Obama's inaugural address (that I've already addressed) hit quite a few notable notes. One of which was the promise to "restore science to its rightful place". He also said,
"Promoting science isn't just about providing Resources-it's about protecting free and open inquiry... It's about listening to what our scientists have to say, even when it's inconvenient - especially when it's inconvenient.
That's a breath of fresh air, indeed. But the real question and challenge will be: What exactly is this Rightful Place? The previous administration acted as though they believed that science belongs after political expedience and the Bible, not necessarily in that order. They fired or censored anyone whose carefully calculated conclusions disagreed with their prejudged opinions. It will be a long time cleaning up the resulting mess. Mike the Mad Biologist posted: To Restore Science to Its Rightful Place, We Need to Redefine Elitism. In brief, science is not easy to follow once you reach the discoveries of The Enlightenment and beyond. It takes a certain amount of education and dedication to know good science from pseudoscience. And this is anathema to American principle of Democratic Populism, the idea that all men are not only "created equal", but are in fact equal.How can you download a youtube video and then play that flv file on your desktop? I've been wondering how to do this, because I sometimes find compelling videos where I wonder whether they will be available in the future. Here's one answer. It's a site by "applian technologies" (not affiliated with youtube) that advises you to insert "pwn" after "www." and before "youtube . . . " It's all free and it does give you an option to NOT download applian's propriety browser toolbar. The site also offers a stand-alone .flv player for youtube videos that you download. I tried the downloader and the player and they both worked perfectly. These might come in handy someday soon.
Here is a beat poem that first appeared on YouTube as a concert bootleg with subtitles about a month ago. The artist quickly had the bootleg taken down. And then received a Storm of protests, requests to post it again. Finally, he put it up himself. Sans subtitles, or even video. So listen well to a rational rant that many of us would love to be capable of delivering. Storm, by Tim Minchin I've seen those warning eyes from both my wives, and held my piece for a while. But the temptation is great to emulate this artists storm of bile.
Science isn't about a particular batch of results. Science is special because of the way in which it gets those results. The following is from a well-written essay in the NYT entitled, "Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy":
Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.