Low on Energy, but Having a Busy Day

Today I was tired, but still managed to accomplish a fair amount.

I’m preparing for a talk and question and answer session to be held Friday at Stanford University. This is a small bit of information dissemination to counter several days of “intelligent design” disinformation being presented at Stanford courtesy of the Veritas Forum. My colleague, Nick Matzke, and I will try to do our bit for the pro-science community. What that meant was that I was dealing with putting together Powerpoint “slides” today. One point I’ll be making is that “intelligent design” claims have been examined on their merits — and found wanting. Why Intelligent Design Fails is a detailed examination of the ID claims that shows why they don’t hold up to scrutiny. It is heading into its third printing at Rutgers University Press, which means that we are reaching people with the message. The event is “Veritas Forum Follow-Up Event: Presentation and Discussion on Intelligent Design”, 4-5:30pm, in building 370 (Science, Technology and Society program), Room 370. The event is sponsored by Rational Thought.

Bill Dembski had a good idea about making media contact information readily available to people, so I started a page for media contacts for the pro-science activists. This includes links to advice on effective writing for letters to the editor and to already existing media contact link pages. There’s nothing wrong with Dembski’s sense of political cunning.

Another item that I’ve worked on this week is the “Tallying the Arguments” project. This is a collaborative effort to exhaustively catalogue the arguments in antievolution sources. I’ve done the basic programming for a data entry front end and set up a discussion thread for coordination of the project.

I also worked on revisions to a paper on measurement of intranarial pressure in bottlenose dolphins to get it through the clearance process at the US Navy Marine Mammal Program. A chunk of that was just fairly tedious formatting changes. But the thing is done, for this round, and headed back to move along to the next step. Next up will be the paper reporting on bioenergetics of intranarial pressure.