Neil deGrasse Tyson’s rebooted “Cosmos” series spent a chunk of time relating a version of the life of Giordano Bruno, including his interactions with the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church and subsequent burning at the stake. This has proven unpopular with the heirs of the Inquisition and other nit-pickers. From the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution […]
Kudos to the state of Florida for making healthcare benefits available to all full-time employees this year. That includes full-time “other personnel services” (OPS) employees, who previously got no benefits whatsoever. This could have been postponed one year, but Florida decided to roll it out this year. But the implementation has glitches. To distinguish part-time […]
An article in The Florida Current reports that the Florida legislature has come to an agreement to give career service state employees a raise — the first in almost seven years. Career service workers earning more than $40K a year would see a $1K increase, and those earning less than that would get a $1.4K […]
The Coppedge v. CalTech and JPL case is done, with a final decision handed down by Judge Hiroshige on Wednesday that confirms his preliminary ruling in favor of JPL. There are news reports here and here about the end of the case. Coppedge had sued, claiming wrongful termination, saying that JPL fired him from his […]
The Mayan apocalypse failed to appear, so I had a nice New Year’s day here in Florida. The temperature got into the 70s here, and not too breezy, so Diane and I worked on various things that all too recently would have been too hot to do comfortably. But here in the evening, I’m reflecting […]
CBS News reports that Allen West(R) has finally conceded the House race for Florida’s 18th District to challenger Patrick Murphy(D). Patrick Murphy wasn’t waiting on that, though; the report says that he is already in Washington, D.C. for orientation. 255833 16905
US Senator from Florida Marco Rubio gave an interview to GQ recently. Rubio was asked a question that Republican politicians simply hate to field: How old is the earth? (Hat tip: Talking Points Memo.) Why is this a difficult question? It isn’t because the science hasn’t been disseminated; this is a part of any middle […]
The Chicago Tribune Fact Check on the debates goes for that false balance thing in the headline: “FACT CHECK: Romney flubs geography, Obama goofs on rival’s record, in final debate” Mitt Romney, candidate for Commander-in-Chief, who not long ago identified Iran as a tippy-top threat to the security of the USA, has no clue about […]
The New York Daily News ran an article from the Associated Press on fact-checking former president Bill Clinton’s speech last night at the Democratic National Convention. Usually, I would simply quote relevant sections, but given the Associated Press’ litigious approach to being quoted on blogs, I will have to recommend that you open the link […]
At the urging of Mike Haubrich, I coded up a poll as I was convalescing from my recent illness. The poll aimed to tease out some of the common motivations that go into the USA presidential vote. The current results are in graphical form: If you’d like to put in your entry in the poll […]
The breaking news story yesterday was Missouri Republican candidate for US Senate Todd Akin’s discussion of abortion and rape. On “The Jaco Report”, Akin was questioned about his anti-abortion stance and whether there should be an exception made to allow women who had been raped and became pregnant to get an abortion. Akin’s response turned […]
On Facebook, I ran across a graphic posted by “Things Liberals Hate” and shared by a Facebook friend. (The “share” apparently no longer exists in my friend’s thread, a few minutes after posting a link to my criticism to the thread. However, The Weekly Standard shows the original graphic.) It shows a bar graph of […]
We’ve heard tales of officialdom greasing the way for people to profit over the consideration of species and ecosystems. Now we’ve got a home-grown Florida tale along those lines. Craig Pittman wrote an article appearing in the Tampa Bay Times that goes into the details. Department of Environmental Protection employee Connie Bersok has been suspended […]
I see from the news that our armed forces have had another bad encounter with dead combatants, this latest kerfluffle stemming from photos taken as military forces pose with blown-up suicide bombers. We end up with another round of apologies, the folks who are supposed to be our allies moving closer to our declared enemies, […]
An op-ed piece by Mike Deering, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Director of Communications, lays out an argument to let ranchers handle conservation of the sage grouse without involving the protection of the Endangered Species Act: The wackos – as I still prefer to call them – have successfully weaseled their way to the front […]
Time’s web page has an article up by Jeffrey Kluger. Kluger is a lawyer and relates his reaction to the briefs filed in the case of David Coppedge v. Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech. Groups like the intelligent design community are not always free to pick their poster children, and it’s unfortunate for them that […]
I ran across a link to a blog post from 2007 by Jeff Shallit. One of the commenters there took exception to Jeff’s statement that the KvD case was primarily about religion, noting that a lot of the decision in the case discusses science. I was five years late to the party, but I felt […]
The editors of the Tulsa World think that Lawmakers should adopt stronger wildlife laws. That’s fair enough in light of the tragedy in Ohio where exotic predators like lions, tigers, and bears were released by a suicidal keeper. But the editorial’s structure left much to be desired, in my opinion. They do have a good […]
We’ve known for a long time that Casey Luskin has some very odd ideas about what constitutes a technical publication. Casey’s been good enough to document another deficiency of his in this respect for all to see, but no one is allowed to comment. (I wonder what happened to the Discovery Institute’s grand experiment in […]
In the Terry Pratchett novel “Witches Abroad”, he sets up an image of “the optimist’s fire”, which he then defines as “two logs and hope”. I bring this up because I’m seeing people who desperately want to be seen as hard-nosed and fiscally responsible proposing the optimist’s economic booster: tax cuts and hope. Cutting taxes […]