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Exam preparation is still getting me down, blogtastically speaking, but let’s forget about that for a minute and listen to British comedian David Mitchell rant about passion. Too right, David, too right. However, I think it’s accurate to say that I’m passionate about evolutionary biology. Oh, and sofas. I’m in a bit of a blogging rut at the moment – not because I don’t have anything to blog about, quite the contrary, but because I’m lacking the time to put anything substantial down that might be of interest to anyone but myself. This is partly due to my midyear university exams, which will be upon me shortly, so this depressed blogging output won’t last long. But I feel bad for depriving you all of content, so here’s a video from one of my favourite Internet comedy groups, SMBC Theatre. It contains swearing and violence, so, yes, take that as you will. Is it bad that I find [...] University has sneaked up behind me in the last couple of days and prevented me from blogging properly. It’s truly annoying, because the Discovery Institute has been spewing out all kinds of misconceptions and fallacies lately, misconceptions and fallacies I will not be able to cover. Darn. Also, my midyear exams are coming up in a couple of weeks, meaning that I will have even less time to blog, instead focusing on studying chemistry, geology, astronomy, music theory… and pretending to study biology. I mean, come on, first-year biology at the University of Melbourne is ludicrously easy. I don’t want to sound arrogant… but it is! Believe me. So, [...] YouTube regularly churns out some excellent videos that communicate science or principles about critical thinking in a beautiful way, and I’m always on the lookout for them, as I know that they can do wonders in getting the general population interested in topics that the skeptical community holds dear. One such video is “65 Million Years With A Creationist”, by philhellenes. Oh wow, it’s quite special. Tell your friends, especially PZ Myers. Are you listening, PZ? You should link to this video. Update: Yes, it turns out you can embed this video. In my defense, however, YouTube did not give me an option to – I had to [...] Thanks to @ilikeportello (Matt) and @spoon579 (Rob) on Twitter for this most excellent find! If you’re a casual skeptic, or know a little about skepticism, you’ll know that a large target for the, er, injection of critical thinking and rationality in recent years has been the anti-vaccination movement. If you’re a little more serious about your skepticism, you’ll know that the man at the root of this anti-science hysteria is Andrew Wakefield, a (former) surgeon who published some pretty dodgy research in 1998 about the safety of the MMR vaccine. However, serious skeptic or no, you may not know the details of the Wakefield case, and what exactly [...] Are you all familiar with Roy Zimmerman, American musical comedian extraordinaire? Well, you should be. He’s updated his brilliant song “Ted Haggard is Completely Heterosexual” (about Pastor Ted Haggard, who was caught with a male prostitute and some quantity of meth) so that there’s now a version about George Rekers, a Baptist minister who was caught a couple of weeks ago in the company of a male prostitute (sensing a theme here?), who he had hired from a website to “carry his luggage”. Mmm, sexy. Of course, it’s perfectly clear that, in fact, George Rekers is completely and utterly heterosexual. [...] Intelligent design news from the 11th of May to the 17th of May, 2010. Robert Crowther, on Evolution News & Views, gave us a brilliant piece of writing about Josh Rosenau’s alleged quote-mining of Camille Paglia: Not the NCSE’s Josh Rosenau. His selective quote mining of her comments meant to imply the exact opposite is Orwellian. To make matters worse he really twists things up when attempts to paint those who champion critical thinking on evolution as postmodern Marxists. ““Critical thinking” sounds great. But it’s a Marxist approach to culture. It’s just slapping a liberal leftist ideology on everything you do. You just find all the ways that power [...] If you missed the live streaming of Saturday’s Skeptically Speaking episode featuring Jason Ball, Elliot Birch and myself from the Young Australian Skeptics, you can now download it as a podcast from either the Skeptically Speaking website or iTunes! I’ve been told by a few people who listened live that apparently it was one of the best shows of the year so far, if not the best, so, er, yeah. You might want to listen to it. I mean, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’d appreciate it. Well, technically I won’t be able to tell that you’ve listened to it, unless you post a comment [...] Along with Jason Ball and Elliot Birch (we’re all from the Young Australian Skeptics), I’m going to be interviewed live on the Canadian skeptical radio show and podcast Skeptically Speaking tomorrow at 10am EST (Australia), or Friday 6pm MST (North America). We’ll be chatting with the lovely and wonderful Desiree Schell, the host of Skeptically Speaking, about young people in the skeptical movement – how they’re getting involved, what more can be done to engage them, how young people see skepticism, and a bunch of other topics. I, personally, may comment on the fact that I’m not a huge fan of rap music, we’ll see. You can send [...] Reasonable Doubts is one of my favourite podcasts – the hosts always know exactly what they’re talking about, give fair amounts of time to opposing viewpoints, talk about interesting and relevant topics, are often hilariously funny, and always have on particularly good guests. The latest two episodes form a two-parter on “Creationism Vs Psychology” – the recent diversification of focus by the Discovery Institute and similar neo-religious think-tanks from simply intelligent design and evolution, to now including attacks on neuroscience and its supposedly antiquated materialist basis. Part 2 was the most interesting for me, as it included an interview/discussion with one of my skeptical heroes, Steven Novella (or, as [...] |
Homologous Legs is the blog of Naon Tiotami (aka. Jack Scanlan), an Australian undergraduate biology student who has a serious problem with creationists, intelligent design proponents and anyone else who misrepresents the science of evolutionary biology.
 
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