The Orca’s Thumb

Have you ever wanted to saunter into mass inconspicuously one Sunday morning to grab one of those delicious crackers — without starting a riot?
Well, if this sounds like you, then your lucky day is (almost) here.
Dr. Xiang Zhang and his group from the University of California are announcing this week, in a pair of articles [...]

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Really?
What most people cannot comprehend is that there is no one absolute make-or-break piece of evidence for evolution.
Shocker.
No, not so. Evolution is a conclusion from the totality of the evidence.
There are thousands of cases that demonstrate that the principles of evolution work and are useful for understanding the natural world; and there are no cases whatsoever where [...]

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Fellow skeptic, Jeff Medkeff, aka Blue Collar Scientist, succumbed to cancer on Sunday.
Damn.

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Dr. Chilingar. Now there’s a character.
After comparing CO2 over billions of years to human CO2 over centuries back in 2006, he is now using formulas that assume greenhouse effects don’t change to argue that greenhouse gases will have no effect.

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Below is a video of Amanda Peet effectively talking about antivaccination nonsense for Cookie magazine.
Best of all, after being attacked by antivaxxers for her comments she held her ground. Go ahead and read it. It’s awesome to behold.

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John McCain is stopping in Louisiana in an unexpected move, and rumor has it he’ll be chatting with the antiscience ID-supporting creationist exorcist Governor of that state, Bobby Jindal, who is considered to be on McCain’s shortlist of vice-presidential candidates…

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Seed has compiled an appealing list of scientific applications for the iPhone.

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Remember Chris Comer, the Texas director of science curriculum, who was pressured into resigning because she forwarded an e-mail announcing a talk by Barbara Forrest?
She sued the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding said e-mail about a lecture critical of the movement to promote intelligent design [...]

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