(Items of current interest, supposedly too transient to be put on the freqref page. Click here to go the maths section.)
Separate page for the conflict in, and rebuilding of, Iraq.
Lest we forget 11th Nov. 1918... and in case we never knew.
Civil liberties versus security?
Is the truth out there? See some raw images from the Cassini-Huygens probe.
David Lloyd's excellent introduction to V for Vendetta: "for people who don't switch off the news"
R.I.P. Magister - see also the Guardian's obituary
Disclaimer: The links below reflect my interests, and not any official stance of either the School of Mathematics and Statistics or the University of Newcastle.
OBS Music Monthly's Top 100 British Albums
MONKEYFILTER: MUSICBLOG LISTING (nov 04)
info about Hallelujah (by Leonard Cohen; covered by Jeff Buckey, Rufus Wainwright)
The Official Mitch Benn Website
BSP are touring this summer/autumn. NME announcement has dates and links to old reviews.
Films to watch out for in 2005?
(msn slate) David Edelstein: The 13 Best Movies of 2004 - Charlie Kaufman's remarriage flick, Metallica's rock therapy, and a final raspberry for Lars von Trier.
Some trailers
That old favourite, the horror movie, is back - with a vengeance. But what's driving films such as The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Flightplan to the top of the box office is a very modern fear: America's global war on terror.
Mothballed blog: Bookslut | Comicbookslut
Good dog. Clever little dog.
As for any controversy this may bring, well, if Brokeback Mountain proved anything, it's this: gay characters piss off all the right people.
The Jade Pagoda forum on Yahoo
Berlekamp: Mathematical Go
PLUS article on CGT: closes with an application to simple chess K+P endgames
Moved to separate file.
Moved to separate file.
Guardian Weekly and the Guardian's World Dispatch
The Guardian, on the 2004 local and European elections.
Narey said he hoped Reid would have the courage to cut prisoner numbers by up to 10,000 from their present level of 78,443, which threatens to breach the service's 'safe' upper limit of 81,150. If he didn't, he would have no choice but to build more jails - something Labour had resisted since coming to power in 1997.
Luciana Berger and Mitch Simmons resigned from the national executive of the NUS and Jonny Warren resigned from the steering committee during the union's national conference last week in Blackpool. They claimed that the union's leadership was "turning a blind eye" to anti-semitic leaflets being distributed at conference and a series of rows on campuses throughout the year.
Muhammed Hussain, 61, from Logwood Street, Blackburn, Lancashire, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud local elections in May 2002.
General stuff: To be gradually dispersed and integrated with other sections
You can't deny the beauty of the strategy. If you stop thinking about terrorism, there won't be any terrorism! Why didn't we try this sooner?
I think there's a very simple alternative to lawsuits and demands for change that would work much better: why not try proposing an experiment? Pick one of the five branches of the armed services, and propose that one be allowed to experiment with integrating openly gay members into specialty position, and simply note the benefits?
The U.S. government's fiscal problems are not in the Social Security system. The U.S. government's fiscal problems are in the General Fund... So why dink around claiming that the most important fiscal-policy thing to do right now is to "fix Social Security"? When the General Fund has problems five times as big happening five times faster?
Posts (mostly by Kevin Drum) at the Washington Monthly:
Links moved to separate file.
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Links moved to section on separate file.
Not yet sorted out properly.
So, yes, compared with most of the Muslim world, Malaysia is a positive example of live-and-let-live multi-cult co-existence, but Shangri-La it isn't.
...what he's saying is not fundamentally different than what countless Christian thinkers taught me when I was growing up: the 10 Commandments are not subject to a vote. If you vote you do it with a newspaper firmly in one hand and the Bible in the other, but you do not expect perfection from the process, which is a human one. The Muslim position that Taheri lays out is not precisely the same--it's a different religion after all--but it's certainly similar. Taheri could not be more clear: he sees nothing fundamentally wrong with Islam as it stands, he sees something fundamentally wrong with the political systems that too many Muslims live under.
There is a belief in widespread circulation ... that Islam is an inherently intolerant, slavery-oriented religion incompatible with democratic pluralism. The picture they paint is often of a dying West allowing the growing cancer of Islam to spread, with liberalism having weakened us to the point where we no recognize the threat or have the will to fight it. If this picture is true, we should be seriously considering forbidding any muslims to immigrate, and looking with suspicion on all muslims within our borders. It is, however, untrue...
In short, those nations with a problem with muslim criminals don't have a muslim problem. They have a problem with excessive tolerance for barbarians.
Muhammad himself constructed the House of Islam using military tactics that included mass killing, torture, targeted assassination, lying and the indiscriminate destruction of productive goods. This may be embarrassing to moderate Muslims, but the propaganda produced by modern terrorists constantly quotes Muhammad's deeds and edicts to justify their actions and to call on other Muslims to support their cause.
I'm also going to actively seek some Muslims to come in and comment on this, as I'm getting tired of feeling like I'm the only one who's unwilling to just accept that Islam's a religion of slavery and intolerance and oppression.
For months a rainbow coalition of gays, lesbians, feminists, Sikhs, Hindus, Jews, secularists and democrats who once supported Livingstone have been fighting a more important battle about his support for Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Yesterday I watched the Van Gogh film on the internet... What the film suggests is that, somehow, domestic violence and rape are linked to specifically Muslim ways of seeing the world and the relationship between men and women. Given the fact that the film is made by a non-Muslim (indeed, by a noted critic of Islam), the effect is disturbing. What is the film-maker's intention? Who is the film aimed at? Imagine a similar film being made here featuring Lubavitcher Jews and suggesting the plight, say, of a child in a closed community...
Every time Charles Clarke and Michael Howard compete for the toughest rhetoric on immigration and asylum, spare a thought for the reverberations it has on the streets of a town such as Keighley, where it helps edge the centre of political gravity that bit closer to the British National party.
Links moved to separate bookmarks page.
The election result was an uncomfortable reminder that democracy doesn\u2019t always produce superficially desirable results, or clean-cut happy endings. Today, Ukraine is in a period of what the French call \u2018co-habitation\u2019. The President is of one party, the Prime Minister another.
It was a secret base, known in authorised circles as Aralsk-7, not marked on any maps. This is because the Soviet Union was using the island for the open-air testing of biological weapons.
Watching, admittedly out of the corner of my eye, events in Kyrgyzstan (I'm not sure how to pronounce it either) I'm wondering if Central Asia might not be the place where the Bush administration's revolutionary rhetoric about democracy crashes head on into the interests of imperial realpolitik.
The fact is, the Russians killed the one Chechen leader with whom they might have begun a political process.
...after coming through three decades of sectarian slaughter, Lisa Dorrian has joined the ranks of Ulster's 'disappeared' - those who have been abducted, in some cases tortured, murdered and then buried in the tightest of secrecy by paramilitary groups, mainly the IRA. Lisa's disappearance, however, is different in one crucial sense - she is the first person to be 'disappeared' by loyalist terrorists.
The central event in both the parliamentary and local elections in Northern Ireland has been the virtual eclipse of the Ulster Unionist party in its centenary year by Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists... Having made the Belfast agreement, and been rewarded in the Assembly elections of June 1998 as the two largest parties in Northern Ireland, both the UUP and the SDLP were then unable to sell it -- or gain politically from selling it -- to their respective communities.
The murder of Robert McCartney, and his family's fight for justice
Older articles
The British and Irish governments yesterday attempted to push negotiations in Northern Ireland forward by publishing documents that would have been released if a deal had been reached. The joint document gives terms of the agreement, and the timetable. It includes draft statements from the IRA, Sinn Fe'in, DUP, and the decommissioning body, the IICD.
Guardian news and comment on Israel and Palestine
The conflict in Lebanon (July 2006)
Misc:
Hamas militants have carved out real legitimacy in Palestinian politics. They have yet to win over their enemies in Israel. And unless that happens, not much will really change.
The country should pull itself together to back the disengagement, and put an end to the disgusting, Holocaust-denying equation being made between the resettlement of Jews from places where settlement was always a moral and strategic error -- a disengagement fraught with extreme danger which is being undertaken in order to safeguard the Jewish state -- and the pogroms and ethnic cleansing of Jews by those who wished them dead.
As one who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and who volunteered to fight for Israel in 1973, I wanted to see for myself... I returned, with the two others who were with me, believing that in the name of security Israel is destroying security.
It is convenient for many British liberals that Israel exists. It saves them from examining the manifest failings in their own actions
Last week Israel agreed an extraordinary arms-for-water deal with Turkey. Whether this goes ahead or not, water lies at the heart of Israel's relationship with its Arab neighbours and the Palestinians - and poses some of the toughest challenges for peace in the Middle East.
Tehran's complex and competing centres of power have been plunged into a spin of contradictory briefing, with hardliners backing Ahmadinejad and reformers trying to limit the damage
Government figures showed more than 17 million votes for Ahmadinejad, 49, the blacksmith's son who has been mayor of Tehran since 2003, compared with around 10 million for Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president and favourite throughout the campaign who had gained the reluctant backing of the beleaguered reformist movement.
The overwhelming reality for the Tehran regime is the enmity of America and Israel under their present governments, and this is an America which, thanks to Iraq, is now on Iran's doorstep. That, in these circumstances, an insecure Iranian government might seek to develop a nuclear weapons option, a "bomb in the basement", would not be surprising. But that once it possessed such a capacity it would use it aggressively is hard to credit.
The White House has unambiguously stated that it does not support the "extraordinary rendition" provisions.
I generally support the 9/11 Commission Bill (which is more formally known as H.R. 10). However, Sections 3032 and 3033 are very disturbing. They make it very easy for the US to move terrorist suspects into the custody of other countries in order to allow such suspects to be tortured in that country.
THE WORST OF IT is the waste. The waste of brains, of talent, idealism and nervous energy — the sheer waste of time — as Cabinet ministers tour the broadcasting studios at ungodly hours in yet another desperate exercise to get the Prime Minister
Unity is the most important quality of any political party, and the Blairites stand, increasingly, against it.
No wonder the third party's standing with the public is in freefall - they've lost their image as the good guys of British politics.
Somebody clearly wants my job. But you wonder if these people are living in the real world.
See separate page for US 2006 midterm elections
Ken Blackwell will lose in November. And, as neither Markos Moulitsas nor Hugh Hewitt know anything about this state, or this race, I'll clue you in on why he is going to lose right here, right now...
Jonathan Raban has some comments and speculation on how O'Connor's statement was reported (with a link to Nina Totenberg's report).
...it was in Virginia, a state that gave Bush 54 percent of its ballots a year ago, that Democrats had the most to learn. Bush guaranteed that the nation's eyes would be focused here by campaigning for Republican Jerry Kilgore just hours before the polls opened. A year ago Republicans everywhere begged and pleaded for the boost in turnout among the faithful that a Bush rally could once guarantee. This year there was no Bush magic.
The decision of Harriet Miers to withdraw her name from consideration for the US supreme court is an indication of how weakened and beleaguered the Bush administration has become. A year ago, though no resolution to the war in Iraq was in sight, the administration was in a commanding position in American politics. Literally so, in that it virtually dictated the terms in which every topic, whether domestic or foreign, could be discussed, imposing narrow limits on debate which affected not only its own supporters but the media, the universities and the opposition party.
...an administration that came to power determined to win maximum freedom of action in foreign policy by going it alone (or recruiting ad hoc coalitions that would submissively follow Washington's lead) has ended up virtually paralyzed by the consequences of its own hubris.
One of the most fascinating -- and deeply amusing -- aspects of the Great Miers Revolt has been watching the conservative rebels react with growing disgust and anger to the tactics the White House is using to try to bulldoze Shrub's pen pal through the confirmation process.
The Rovian game plan is, in all its essentials, the same sleazy blend of double speak, half-truths, non sequiturs, demagogic appeals and knees-to-the-groin smears that were used to sell the invasion of Iraq. But those who applauded then -- and again when the same patented blend of slime was used in the Cheney-Bush reelection campaign -- are howling about it now that they're the intended targets.
I'm not talking about generic apologies for historical injustices, I'm talking about accepting responsibility for specific failures of his administration. Did Clinton do this any more than Bush has?
...facing what is clearly a full-scale political disaster, Rove and a handful of other masterful political operatives have gone into overdrive. They are back in campaign mode. This campaign is to salvage Bush's reputation.
Frist and DeLay and the rest of the Rove gang may not have any kind of grand design for a GOP Thousand Year Reich, but rather may be acting like the Easter Islander I talked about in an earlier post -- the one who cut down the last remaining tree on the island.
In 2018, Social Security will begin paying out more money than it takes in. This is what Dennis Hastert calls the "crisis point." But the entire federal government is paying out more money than it takes in right now.
Bush is a very simple man. You may think that makes him a bad president, as I do, but lots of people don't—and there are more of them than there are of us.
...you're going to get a simple president again next time, whether you like it or not. The only question is whether that president will be from your party or the other one.
Put all this together, and it points in one direction: the mistakes Bush has made in his first term are likely to be amplified in a second, not reined in. In a crisis, it's likely that he will rely on his gut, refuse to recognize ground truth from dissenters, ignore foreign leaders, and fatally fail to recognize the real sources of danger.
I don't agree with Wolfe that our sense of morality is "twisted," but I do agree that we probably lose a lot of support we don't need to lose because of a very real -- and often dripping -- condescension toward anyone we consider less enlightened than us...
We didn't lose the election by much, and there are plenty of red staters who aren't extremists... they disagree with us, but not so much that they can't be brought around or persuaded to vote for us based on other issues. Too often, though, a visceral loathing of being lectured at by city folks wins out and they end up marking their ballots for people like George Bush.
When we last left off, my probability of voting for Kerry was at 60% ... After the debates, I'd say my p-value for Kerry is now at 80%. I'm still uneasy about making this choice, because I remain unconvinced that Kerry understands the limits of multilateral diplomacy.
A summary in the Observer of the 9/11 commission's public hearings.
The prevailing attitude these days seems to be that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and we put up with it because if we didn't, women would have them in back alleys anyway. It is the lesser of two evils, therefore, and as such, must be cloaked in silence, since whichever way you look at it, it still has an evil at its core. This line has taken hold because it is the least controversial way of supporting the right: so an MP standing up and saying "Women need this right, because otherwise they will put their health at risk having illegal terminations" will not find the pro-life lobby instantly rearing up against them, petitioning their constituents with what a murderer he or she is.
There have been many news reports detailing how the U.S. pressured the UK government to make the arrests sooner, possibly out of political motivations.
It is already the most dangerous place in the world outside a conflict zone, but the death of a man in custody has pushed Australia's Palm Island to breaking point.
We learned pretty quickly after last week's successful Hezbollah missile attack on an Israeli corvette that the missile concerned probably came from Iran. Less well known was the fact that if the missile was what analysts said it was, then its original place of origin was China.
I've mentioned before that Israel is China's second largest defense supplier, in terms of value...
Even as the wages are falling, Little Zhang still is renting his own place outside with his own money instead of staying at the Foxconn dormitory ("all workers are provided with free food and board"). This writer was perplexed. "I am going to tell you about how many people live in one room and that will absolutely shock you -- 700 people!" His eyes opened wide as he uttered this last number.
She confirms one thing that we all knew but that anti-Zionist activists have routinely denied: that there is a serious problem of open antisemitism within the broad Palestine Solidarity movement...
So it is important that Sue has chosen to confront this open antisemitism rather than to avert her eyes. In doing so she is also bearing witness to its existence and to the fact that it is a growing problem. And she has chosen to do so in an Egyptian newspaper and has thereby challenged not only the open antisemitism within her own movement but also the open antisemitism that is common in the Middle East.
Retinitis pigmentosa is the blanket name given to a heterogeneous group of inherited and incurable disorders of the retina which affect around one in every 3,500 people. I'm one of them. The condition causes the photoreceptive cells on the retina slowly to die off, resulting, in my case, in the loss of peripheral vision (the bit you use to move around or spot someone waving out of the corner of your eye) and the development of tunnel vision. My central vision (the area used for seeing detail - reading and writing, for example) remains intact, apart from a slight distortion you can liken to looking through a dirty windscreen. This blurring is caused by macular oedema (a swelling, or water retention, on the retina), a common side-effect of the primary disease. In time, these peepholes will shrink to pinholes and I'll go blind.
By way of DK, Right For Scotland has a widely mentioned post about the underclass in Port Glasgow. For some reason, the writer seems to believe that the growth of this layabout, dope-smoking, expectorating, shellsuit encased group is to do with socialism. It's about `something-for-nothing' culture and handouts and all that.
Course, that's bollocks, and ahistorical bollocks at that. The underclass has always been with us.
Only a handful of veterans of the war to end all wars remain, but there were no gaps in the Remembrance Day parade to the Cenotaph yesterday: despite the prayers of those who survived, it turned out that war did not go out of fashion, and nor has remembrance.
Missouri officials are arguing that an incarcerated woman who needs an abortion can't have one...All the woman needs--her family has agreed to pay for the abortion, since the state of Missouri won't--is $350 for transportation. But I guess that, despite her right to medical treatment, she's not entitled to actually *get* the medical treatment unless she can pay for it herself.
Tonight I watched Virginia Valian's``Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women", a speech given at MIT’s School of Engineering in 2002. The speech covers numerous experiments and sources of data which suggest evidence for and possible reasons behind the disparity in academic advancement of women.
I learned that weapons-grade uranium is the nuclear feedstock, so to speak, for a number of medical isotopes. I learned that the companies that make those isotopes operate their own private reactors, using uranium purchased from the U.S. government. And I learned that those reactors are not, repeat not, subject to the same security restrictions as government-owned megadeath factories.
The best way of countering the clashing dogmatisms of our time is to be suspicious of any idée fixe - including our own.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday set out ambitious goals for the Bush administration's push for greater democracy overseas over the next four years, including pressing for competitive presidential elections this year in Egypt and women's right to vote in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.
Egypt, therefore, is a test case. Serious pressure from Mr Bush for political reform in Egypt would demonstrate that he is sincere when he talks of promoting freedom, and that he is committed to it regardless of other considerations.
Several hours later an emergency room doctor saw Dilawar. By then he was dead. It would be months before army investigators learned a final horrific detail: most of the interrogators had believed Dilawar was an innocent man who drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
When did the switch flick from young adults scrabbling for independence at all costs to young adults squatting at home like big hairy toddlers, waiting for the Life Fairy to knock on the door with a lucky bag containing a top job, a fabulous house and an instant astronomical salary.
Four years ago I stood on a recreation ground on the Halton Moor estate in Leeds and watched as three wrecked, burnt-out cars, set alight by joyriders, were winched on to the back of a lorry... I asked a gloomy youth called Malcolm on a bike what it was like living on the estate. `It's crap,' he said. I asked him whether things had improved at all during the four years of Labour government. `No,' he said, `its got crapper.'
This week, the only wreck on the recreation ground is me. Partially blind, in a wheelchair and soon to start kidney dialysis, I have deteriorated badly but Halton Moor has been transformed.
Briefly, the sponsorship scandal involved the diversion of more than $100 million of federal money from its intended purpose (promoting Canadian nationalism in Quebec) into the pockets of the Liberal Party and its supporters, via several pro-Liberal advertising agencies.
Whether you were for or against the invasion, whether you believe the results have been broadly beneficial to the Middle East or an unmitigated disaster that will go on costing innocent lives does not matter. This issue is about the way Britain is governed and Tony Blair's use of the political machine to mould and distort the advice of civil servants and intelligence chiefs.
I am never offended by being told I'm wrong, or even being told that I've been excessively snotty. About the only way you can honestly offend me is by attacking my motives.
Researchers from Flinders University in Australia interviewed 81 girls aged between five and eight and found that nearly half - 46.9% - wanted to be thinner, while 45.7% said they would go on a diet if they gained weight. According to the research paper, reported in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology, just 11 of these girls (14%) were actually overweight, and three (4%) were obese.
Instead of apologising for comparing a Jewish journalist to a Nazi working in the concentration camps, the London mayor decides to drag Israel into the debate... The mayor feels the need to emphasise that he's not an anti-semite, but "only" anti-Israeli.
Nothing will alter the fact the war was fought on a lie. If we concede that such means are justified by the ends, do we deserve ever to be told the truth again?
The point is not to add to conservative ranks by conforming to every last detail of the caricature of the PC prig, but to isolate, fight and defeat them.
The bottom line is that while the nature of other societies should always be a foreign policy consideration, it cannot and should not always be the foreign policy priority.
The cleaners were spitting with fury at Blair's breezy comment on Frost this week that "there are good cleaners and bad cleaners". No, there are squeezed cleaning budgets with contracted-out minimum wage cleaners using watered-down detergents, aged mops, no training, no equipment, one cleaner to five wards and 30% vacancies in London.
She survived a flight with 14 harmless Syrian musicians -- then spread 3,000 bigoted and paranoid words across the Internet. As a pilot and an American, I'm appalled.
Stuff at TAP online:
Some in the group felt that we shouldn't bother teaching kids how to take notes because this generation think that everything is so easy to find, and yet they're swamped by an influx of information; they have lost all capacity for discriminating and synthesising let alone analysing the information that comes their way. That seemed to me a pretty poor argument for NOT teaching them note-taking skills, which are all about synthesising and sifting information for relevance.
2002 pamphlet by Catalyst: Selection Isn't Working(executive summary)
I am not sure I want my children to amass even bigger shedloads of debt so that universities can hire American management gurus to teach MBAs.
After seven years of a government which started so promisingly, with the emphasis where it should be on standards and what goes on in the classroom, we have come full circle and ended up where the Tories left off. In other words, we are still hoping that structures, opting out, choice and the market will deliver the universal high standards which have eluded this country for so long.
Guardian special report: Universities in crisis
Graduates will have to work well into their thirties before they can reap the financial benefits of getting a degree, according to new research that will make many parents and teenagers question the value of university.
The cult of the private, of private management techniques, the general embrace of the market principle into the public sector has already disfigured education in this country to a devastating degree. And by 'this country' I mean Scotland. Here we have no grammar schools at all, no city academies, a fraction of the number of schools run by various experts in the supernatural compared to England, a smaller private sector - yet we've still managed to mess everything up by embracing the market to the limited extent we have.
Sylvia Thomas taught in many rough schools throughout the Seventies without ever needing to raise her voice to keep control... last autumn, she returned to education as a supply teacher. She was so shocked by what she saw that she joined forces with the award-winning veteran documentary maker, Roger Graef, to expose it.
The senior education adviser asked by Labour to revamp the secondary school exam system hit back at the government last night after it firmly rejected his blueprint for an overarching new diploma to replace GCSEs and A-levels.
At the age of 11, grammar schools select the brightest children from miles around. Then, when pupils reach the age of 16, the school often has another trawl, discarding pupils who will not bring them higher up the A-level league tables, and poaching a very few of the best and brightest whom they may have missed at the age of 11.
The current system is not producing what we need: a meritocracy of highly skilled, motivated people who have developed their talents. It delivers impressive statistics rather than students with impressive educations.
Head teachers from state and public schools have combined to set off the biggest change in 50 years in the system for awarding university places to school leavers... Their report, which has the backing of Charles Clarke, the Secretary of State for Education, would mean that students receive the news of their A-level grades earlier, and apply for university places when they know how well they have done.
This third call from the EPSRC's crime technology programme invites engineering and physical sciences researchers to bid for up to £3m in research funding to bring their knowledge and skills to bear in the fight against crime.
Even during the war years, when half of Sierra Leone was depopulated and 200,000 people slain, foreign students trickled in from nearby Anglophone countries, especially Nigeria, Ghana and neighbouring Liberia. What drew them was a tradition of academic excellence almost unrivalled on the continent.
(G 09-09-03) Guardian: factsheet on student loans
Links for reference on Glucose-6-phosphate dihydrogenase deficiency.
In a controversial move that delighted scientists and infuriated pro-life campaigners, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority gave a team at Newcastle University the first licence to create embryos and extract stem cells from them for research.
The world's first stem cell bank opens in Hertfordshire today, putting Britain at the forefront of one of the most controversial areas of modern scientific research.
Moved to separate bookmark file for climate change links.
debate (not always informed, or polite, on either side!) over Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel
New section, with some links refuting the ID sophistry:
... the entire purpose of the Templeton Foundation is to blur the line between straightforward science and explicitly religious activity, making it seem like the two enterprises are part of one big undertaking. It's all about appearances. You have a splashy scientific conference featuring a long list of respected participants, and then you proudly tout the event on a separate web page for your program to bring science and religion together. It doesn't matter that I am a committed atheist, simply giving a talk on interesting findings in modern cosmology; my name would become implicitly associated with an effort I find to be woefully misguided.
For the conservative forces engaged in the struggle for America's soul, the true battleground is public education, the laboratory of the next generation, and an opportunity for the religious right to effect lasting change on popular culture.
takedown of some creationist's `thesis'
For the geek in me: Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.
Reviews of Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science: one at Crooked Timber and one byBrendan Nyhan.
Actually, Gregg Easterbrook writing about anything other than football is bad news, but science is particularly bad... I wish people would stop hiring Easterbrook to write serious pieces, because I really enjoy his football stuff. Every time he writes about science, though, he comes off as a pinhead.
The question confronting women scientists is: Should I have a baby at this stage of my career, or should I wait?
I imagine all of us women scientists encounter this question. And once we make a decision, I bet we continue to question that decision.
...the starting point for systems biologists isn't the gene but rather a mathematical model of the entire cell... Despite decades of research few genes have been found that play anything more than a minor role in complex traits like heart disease, autism, schizophrenia or intelligence. The reason may be that such genes simply don't exist. Rather than being "caused" by single genes these traits may represent a network perturbation generated by small, almost imperceptible, changes in lots of genes.
Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle was for are going to have a mess on their hands... Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.
As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process. That so much about the vehicle design is bizarre and confused is the direct result of the Shuttle's little-remembered role as a military vehicle during the Cold War.
A while ago I had written this summary of their mistakes (reproduced below). They thanked me personally for this `very accurate' description of their work and said that I was among the very few who really understood the `big picture' of their work. Well, that's nice, because it allows me to use this certified authority to say in all clarity that the ideas summarized at the above link are indeed based on elementary misconceptions and invalid conclusions and hence make no sense.
(More links on internal file)
The excuse here is that Firefox caches the rendered versions of (by default) 8 pages per tab. The representation it uses is gloriously inefficient so even a modest number of tabs and/or windows gobbles up memory like a bastard...
Perhaps the smart money now is on Opera, but I'm not convinced. At least with Mozilla / Firefox you can fix the bugs, or at least you could if you enjoyed C++ (I presume the people reading this are sane enough not to). My Opera-using friends tell me that the Opera people do at least understand fork(2), so that when one window crashes it doesn't take the others with it.
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Thus, "Markdown" is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.
Emacs commands:
| C-x C-s | saves current file |
| C-x C-u | undo |
| C-w | kill (equiv. ``cut") |
| C-y | yank |
| Meta-% | replace |
| C-s | I-search |
(This section is very much out of date and is just kept here while I try to sort out a better place for the links.)
See the pubmath page for the slightly more relevant stuff.
Stuff from the Notices of the AMS (PostScript files):
See some older links for more snippets from the NAMS.
Other news:
