Gov. Rick Perry commuted a death sentence today. This is the first commutation in eight years so close to an execution. Any commutation recommendation is rare in Texas.
Is this just one commutation, or does it signal a change?
Historic moment: Texas commutes a death sentence
August 30, 2007
3 Comments | 
Current History, History, Justice, Law, Texas, Texas history | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Preacher looks again: Did Hubble kill God?
August 30, 2007Sometimes religion and science don’t clash at all.
[Update February 17, 2015: Real Live Preacher is a dead blog. Author Gordon Atkinson now writes here (and other places you can find from there); but most of these links won’t work. My apologies for the passage of time . . .]
Unlike the last time we visited this remarkable photograph, some people of faith look at it and see beauty, insted of seeing conflict between reality and their holy books.
I know of a Real Live Preacher who doesn’t abuse the science in finding a religious message in the photo.
So first vertigo, then panic, then longing. After that I generally calm down a bit. My tiny mind and delicate emotions cannot bear even my small thoughts of the universe for more than a few minutes. I relax. Sometimes a shrinking reality can be a comfort. My sins, the things that I have done wrong and the ways that I cannot be what I should be, also shrink. I feel I can forgive myself for them, small man that I am. Why the hell not? Look at the size of the universe!
This forgiveness is the Grace that Christians speak of. The main story of our faith tells us that we must be forgiven and can be. Funny how it takes science to bring that reality to my guts.
For some reason, this experience always ends with a crazy happiness that I cannot easily explain. I become giddy with the knowledge that ultimate reality is so far beyond our grasp. This lets me off the hook, to a certain extent. We’ll never know reality. We’ll never even map our solar system, you and I. We’re small people, but we have grasped the idea of existence. We know love, seek knowledge, and recognize goodness and evil.
Our saintly scientists, single-minded and incredibly committed to the search for truth, draw down amazing pictures from the ancient light in the sky. These pictures help me to know that it is okay to be nothing more or less than what we are.
One might visit Real Live Preacher just for the art, too (see sample above). A remarkable site.
3 Comments | Accuracy, Astronomy, Current History, Physics, Religion, Science, Science and faith | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Great Wall of China crumbling
August 29, 2007Nothing lasts forever.
From MSNBC comes an Associated Press report that the Great Wall of China is falling down in places, the victim of blowing sands. The blowing sands are the result of a Dust-Bowl-like overplowing spree after World War II.
- Photo of crumbling section of Great Wall of China, in Mongolia; 2003 photo by preetamrai
Observations:
1. Geography teachers should copy this story and follow it; soil erosion killed Babylon and several other civilizations in the Fertile Crescent (and Carthage, if we allow that the erosion was promoted by the Romans as a weapon of genocide); the Great Wall is one of those features that most people think strong an permanent. This is also a great insight into construction methods — the parts of the Wall that are crumbling appear to have been made of mud. Adobe construction, anyone (someday I have to finish that post).
2. World history teachers ought to note it for the same reasons as geography teachers. U.S. history teachers will want to keep this to compare it to the Dust Bowl. There are also signs that humans may have significantly altered the local biota and, perhaps, climate, with their construction and agriculture methods.
3. China’s ascent in world position brings responsibilities it may have hoped to avoid, such as protecting the environment. Ending the encroachment of the desert in this case is a tall order — but if it can be done there, perhaps it can also be done around the Sahara, around the Namib, around the Syrian Desert, and other places where grasses once grew, but dust now blows. These sites are more common than one might think.
4. Santayana’s ghost: Didn’t China pay attention to the events of the U.S. Dust Bowl?
Tip of the old scrub brush to Jonathan Turley’s new blog — Turley’s a good lawyer with very interesting cases; his views are a welcome addition. Most of his blog simply points to interesting legal issues.
4 Comments | Disasters, Dust Bowl, Environmental protection, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, History, Santayana's ghost | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
π = 3: A discussion of Biblical literalism
August 29, 2007In the comments — continued from a thread at Gospel of Reason, a blog no longer growing.
119 Comments | Evolution, Religion, Science, Science and faith | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
One Texas, under God
August 29, 2007A federal district court judge dismissed a challenge to the new law in Texas which adds “under God” to the Texas pledge, on top of the Texas law which requires all kids to say the pledge every day.
The Texas Lege, long the foil of Molly Ivins, was in particularly fine form this year, writing commandments from God and curtsies to God into several state activities. While I’m way behind on railing about these requirements, our Texas State Attorney General, Greg Abbott, has little more to do than make sure God gets his due — God being incapable of doing that himself, I suppose. Houston’s being over-run with storm refugees who disproportionately brought their guns, drug and gambling habits with them, juries in East Texas being under fire for being racially imbalanced and sentencing way more blacks to death than would seem reasonably by any statistical measure, and millions of school dollars disappearing in charter school scams and other scandals across the state, and Texas having the highest number and highest percentage of kids without health insurance, all pale by comparison to the Texas Lege’s and Mr. Abbott’s calls to make sure Texas kids pledge allegiance to the correct deity in the correct way.
Abbott’s opposite-editorial-page opinion ran in this morning’s Dallas Morning News. He gets his full say, below the fold.
1 Comment | Education, Law, Politics, Religion, School discipline | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Majerus’s Peppered Moth PowerPoint
August 29, 2007True to his word, Michael Majerus put up on his lab’s website the PowerPoint slides from his presentation in Sweden, in which he verified Bernard Kettlewell’s findings that natural selection had changed the colors of certain moths in Britain.
Go to Majerus’s website and download the .ppt presentation. Warning — it’s about 60 megabytes. [Problems of time: The PowerPoint has disappeared from that site; go here to get the paper on Majerus’s research.]
Have you ever noticed that creationists don’t put up on their lab websites the papers or slide presentations they make at scientific meetings? What’s up with that, creationists?
See earlier post, here, “Creationists lose key Texas case.”
2 Comments | Accuracy, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Research, Voodoo science | Tagged: Accuracy, creationist hoaxes, Evolution, peppered moths, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Creationists lose key Texas case, peppered moths
August 29, 2007Texas creationists have lost a key case in their campaign against biology textbooks. No, not in the courts.
They lost their case in nature. In the wild.
Colors changed in peppered moths because of natural selection, a new study confirms. This strikes a serious blow to one of the chief creationist complaints about how evolution is discussed in biology textbooks. Photo at right showing two moths, of the light and dark forms, against pollution-colored tree bark; photo by John S. Haywood, from Kettlewell’s paper, via Encyclopedia Britannica.
British moth researcher Michael Majerus reported that a seven-year research project has confirmed the 1950s work of Bernard Kettlewell: Changes in the coloring of peppered moths is a result of natural selection at work. Majerus is the researcher whose work was mischaracterized by creationists as having questioned or disproven Kettlewell’s work, which showed that natural selection was responsible for a change in the color of most peppered moths in Britain.
Majerus reported his study at a biologists’ meeting in Sweden on August 23. “We need to address global problems now, and to do so with any chance of success, we have to base our decisions on scientific facts: and that includes the fact of Darwinian evolution. If the rise and fall of the peppered moth is one of the most visually impacting and easily understood examples of Darwinian evolution in action, it should be taught. It provides after all: The Proof of Evolution.”
5 Comments | Accuracy, Biology, Education, Evolution, Intelligent Design, Research, Texas, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Pushing them out of the nest
August 29, 2007It’s been an interesting last few days. Saturday we drove to Austin to catch a session with a group called Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL), as younger son James is looking hard to find a good college fit for next fall. Sunday, Troop 355 honored its fifth Eagle this year (one of the five being James), and then we attended the ordination of a friend from our congregation, a recent graduate from Brite Divinity at TCU.
School started yesterday across Texas.
This afternoon older son Kenny popped in for a quick laundry run and to pick up some items he needs for the start of his third year at UT-Dallas.
So much change, all the time.
Over at Musings of a Dinosaur, a touching piece about sending the young ones off to college, in contrast to our own college trips 30 or so years ago. Teachers have more to send off to college, more often. Either that’s what ages us, or it’s what keeps us young.
6 Comments | College, Education, Family, First day, History, Life | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Texas: Doomed or not?
August 28, 2007Phil Plait said there is good news out of Texas, the state’s not doomed, since the State Board of Education members said they don’t want to force intelligent design onto the biology curriculum. P. Z. Myers says doom still lurks, since that statement is part of the strategy of doom planned for Texas by the Discovery Institute, which is now pushing a “teach the weaknesses of evolution” tactic.
Doomed or not? Where is the tie breaker?
The tie breaker, Dear Reader, is you. Read the rest of the post to see what you can do to save Texas, and your state, too.
3 Comments | Creationism, Education, Education quality, Evolution, Intelligent Design, State school boards, Texas, Texas Freedom Network, Texas Lege, Textbook Selection | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Feynman, on the inconceivable nature of nature
August 27, 2007NOVA had a couple of good programs on Richard Feynman that I wish I had — it had never occurred to me to look at YouTube to see what people might have uploaded.
I ran into this one:
Richard Feynman struck my consciousness with the publication of his quite humorous autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. I thought it was a wonderful book, full of good character portraits of scientists as I saw them in my undergraduate days, only more famous ones. He followed that with What Do You Care What Other People Think?
By then, of course, Feynman was one of my heroes. His stories are useful in dozens of situations — his story of joining the samba bands in Rio testify to the joy of living, and the need for doing new things. Brazil was also the place he confronted the dangers of rote learning, when students could work equations perfectly for examples in the book — which they had memorized — but they couldn’t understand real world applications, such as describing how the sunlight coming off the ocean at Ipanema was so beautiful.
Feynman wrote about creationism, and about the dangers of voodoo science, in his now-famous essay on “Cargo cult science” — it’s so famous one has difficulty tracking down the facts to confirm the story.
Feynman’s stories of his wife, and her illness, and his love for her, were also great inspirations. Romance always gets me.
I failed to track him closely enough. During the run of the President’s Commission on Americans Outdoors, we had the misfortune of having scheduled a hearing in Orlando on January 30 (or maybe 29), 1986. We had hoped that the coincidental launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger on January 28 might boost our press response. Of course, the Challenger exploded. Our hearing went on as planned (we had a tough schedule to meet). The disaster affected our staff a lot, those who were in Florida, and the rest of us in Washington where many of us had been on the phone to Florida when the disaster occurred.
Feynman’s appointment to the commission studying the disaster was a brilliant move, I thought. Our schedule, unfortunately, kept me tied up on almost every day the Challenger commission met. So I never did walk the three blocks down the street to meet Feynman, thinking there would be other opportunities. He was already fatally ill. He died on February 15, 1988. I missed a chance of a lifetime.
We still have Feynman’s writings. We read the book aloud to our kids when they were younger. James, our youngest and a senior this year, read Surely You’re Joking again this summer, sort of a warmup to AP physics and his search for a college.
And we still have audio and video. Remembering Feynman makes even the most avidly atheist hope for an afterlife, just to get a chance to hear Feynman explain what life was really all about, and how the universe really works.
Other notes:
- BBC made portions of The Pleasure of Finding Things Out available for free online. These interviews include a short video of his explaining how a scientist can perceive the beauty of a flower at many different levels, beyond the artist’s view — a testament to science as a way of knowing AND appreciating life.
- Feynman’s New Zealand lectures on QED (quantum electrodynamics) in streaming video; Feynman’s 1965 Nobel was for his work inventing QED.
- Just for geography students (and teachers), the Friends of Tuva. Tuva probably still is the most obscure nation on Earth (no, it’s not a hoax).
- Feynman’s offhand remarks in 1959, which ushered in the age of magnetic media, floppy disks, and even smaller computer storage devices.
- Feynman’s posthumous guest appearance in the comic strip “Alley Oop.”
- Feynman accurately harpoons and lampoons state science textbook selection processes (pay attention, Don McLeroy!).
- Feynman sources
- A version of his essay on cargo cult science, which was adapted from the commencement address he gave at Cal Tech in 1974.
7 Comments | Atomic Bomb, Biography, Books, Education, Heroes, History, History video sources, Manhattan Project, Reason, Science | Tagged: Atomic Bomb, Biography, Books, Education, Heroes, history video, Physics, Reason, Richard Feynman, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Spanking fetish
August 27, 2007Start of the new school year, hits on the major post I did on spanking in schools pick up a little. Interest runs in waves, roughly with the dates of new semesters, or with a proposal to ban it altogether.
One question I get asked occasionally in e-mail is, who supports spanking? Apart from the one school district named in the article I cited in the earlier post, there is a core of supporters who now claim Biblical authority for spanking. It’s a move among religionists, as odd as any other religion-based behavior I can think of.
No kidding. Notice there are multiple parts to that topic on that blog.
It’s the comments that creep me out. These people treat spanking as a fetish. (See Frank’s comments here, or this one, showing it’s a movement (or cult).
What would Jesus use to strike a child? The question itself is repugnant.
2 Comments | Corporal punishment, Education, School discipline | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Rachel Carson and DDT “ban” save millions of lives
August 27, 2007[This post has been edited to correct links to go to their new URLs, I hope. Please note in comments any links that don’t work.]
Some are Boojums is back — that’s good news for truth seekers, science error debunkers and historians who care about accuracy.
Masthead photo for Jim Easter’s blog, Some Are Boojums
Some are Boojums author Jim Easter guts the anti-Rachel Carson case in his relaunch post.
Pay particular attention to what Jim writes in conclusion:
That’s right. The 1972 DDT ban did nothing to restrict the chemical’s use against malaria, but had the effect of eliminating the single most intense source of selection pressure for insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. As the rest of the world followed suit in restricting agricultural use of DDT, the spread of resistance was slowed dramatically or stopped. By this single action, William Ruckelshaus — and, credit where it’s due, Rachel Carson — may well have saved millions of lives.
Steven Milloy is invited to add that to the DDT FAQ any time it’s convenient.
Particularly notable is Jim’s work to make available the much miscited administrative law ruling by Judge Edmund M. Sweeney. It is now available on-line, so the critics can now provide accurate citations to the decision, if their intent were to inform the public, instead of maligning the truth and misleading the public.
Mr. Easter’s applied history work in this effort is notable. The internet misses much of near-recent history, especially from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Much of today’s political discussion could benefit from information that would be available in libraries, had libraries not suffered from great budget and priorities cuts in the last 20 years. Jim Easter’s contribution to making a more complete record of the history of DDT and the history of the EPA deserves applause.
4 Comments | Accuracy, Biology, Bogus history, Conservation, DDT, Environmental protection, Historic documents, Rachel Carson, Science, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: Bogus history, DBQ, DDT, EPA, Historic documents, Jim Easter, Judge Edmund Sweeney, Rachel Carson, Some Are Boojums | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Alberto Gonzales resigned . . .
August 27, 2007. . . Friday, but the president didn’t tell us about it until today.
According to the the New York Times (which broke the story):
“The unfair treatment that he’s been on the receiving end of has been a distraction for the department,” the official said.
Injustice even as he leaves. It’s the fair treatment Gonzales received that should have forced him out. The U.S. Justice Department is a mess above the political appointee level, with serious mismanagement, mal-management and lack of management threatening justice and the administration of law at several levels.
Other notable coverage: The Washington Post story now includes notes to Gonzales’s terse announcement, and links to recent stories in the Post which lend perspective and a lot of information.
Leave a Comment » | Capturing history, Civil Rights, History, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Politics, Presidents, Scandals, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
You had to be there
August 25, 2007Jim Easter at Some Are Boojums wondered what it would look like if we assumed in history what creationists claim about biology, geology, paleontology, archaeology and astronomy — “No one alive today was there, so no one can say what happened.”
His detailing of the “10 Questions to Ask Your History Teacher” is a parody of Jonathan Wells’ attempt to get kids to tell biology teachers that biology is hoakum. It’s worth a read again, since the issue heats up again at the Texas State Board of Education.
Get ready, history teachers: Here come the kids with the questions!
1 Comment | Creationism, Darwin, Ethics, George Washington, Historic documents, History, Voodoo history, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
For Cronolink
August 25, 2007A too-long discussion at Vox Populi, after an odd post by Vox Day. I couldn’t post my last response. I’m leaving it here for a poster named Cronolink, if Cronolink cares to continue the discussion (in comments, of course).
[See updated material: “Vox Day: Trapped in a quote mine cave-in”]
10 Comments | Creationism, Darwin, History, Intelligent Design, Voodoo science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 