Kathy and I are moved into our new (rented) home but still surrounded by boxes, some of which still contain much of my library. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can get my stuff organized so I can start thinking about blogging again…
[Aye, still among the living I be and meaning to sail back into blogging waters as soon as fair winds allow...]
You may want to wash this one before you wear it, it looks a little funky:
The Germ
Yes, Evo-T’s is breaking out of the text only genre and moving into the world of graphics. Our first offering is a stylized germ (an original creation by yours truly) in both black (pictured above) for lighter colored shirts and white for darker ones. As always there are both men’s and women’s cuts available.
A percentage of every purchase goes towards keeping this blog running and keeping my lights turned on.
So give a hoot and buy a dang shirt! You won’t care much for the alternative…
Special thanks to my brother-in-law, George Pizarro, for helping clean up my pencil drawing into a presentable computer graphic image!
I have had the honor of being invited to join the crew over at Panda’s Thumb, the premier counter creationism blog on the interwebs and have gladly accepted.
Your truly with a Prof. Steve Steve impersonator.
Fear not my minions (all 5 or 6 of you), Playing Chess with Pigeons is not going anywhere! This is will remain the focus of my blogging. Little things here; big things here but cross posted to Panda’s Thumb as well (more traffic, more better!).
Thanks to the Panda’s people for having me, I hope to live up to the honor.
Actress & comedian Julia Sweeney gives a very funny account of when her eight year old daughter asked her about the facts of sexual reproduction.
I am currently having some underemployment issues, due to having my hours drastically reduced at my job (as a small printing press operator), this has led, amongst other things, to a dispute with B of A (it seems they frown upon not getting mortgage payments, and foreclose on you when you don’t make them, who knew?).
So anyway, I want to take the opportunity of my lately increased traffic to bring attention to the links in the side bar that can take you to either my website (where a PayPal donation button can be found in the left-hand sidebar, because WordPress won’t allow the link directly!) or to my online T-shirt store (Evo-T’s).
A mere 10 cents, less that the cost of a cup of coffee (20 years ago), attached to each daily blog view can make a real difference in a bloggers life…
Any help you can give in these difficult times would be much appreciated and go to a great cause, moi and my fight against the forces of endarkment. A direct PayPal donation is much more efficient but if you absolutely must have something more tangible than my continued writing about creationist silliness, then by all means buy a frelling shirt. :)
Thanks
Or go directly to PayPal and send donations to:
[On the bright side, not working makes more time for blogging...]
I’ve broken down and opened a Twitter account. So now you can read some of my (short) jokes, quips, links or whatever, that I don’t deem worthy of blogging about!
Soooo exciting, I know…
Follow me, NOW! I command you!!!
Image source: BBC Nature website.
To be filed under “Better Know Your Blogger”:
The archaeological dig being conducted by my mother at my parents house continues. Unfortunately this time she has unearthed evidence that I may not be a properly licensed Dinosaur Hunter (at least in the state of Utah)!
It seems that while I got the license itself (when I was 10 years old), it was never properly filled out:
The address has been redacted, but missing from the original is the signature of the Deputy Lizard Warden of the time, Al E. Oup. This could be a problem next time I’m in Utah!
Deputy Warden Oup (or Oop as it is more properly spelled) with one of his charges.
I had totally forgotten about this fun bit of tourist ephemera, which as it turns out, they still give out at Dinosaurland in Vernal, UT. In fact you can download a copy of the much fancier current Dinosaur Hunting Lic. from their website. Though I notice that the current Deputy Lizard Warden is now given as being “Al O’saurus” (obviously the Al E. Oup joke is for a past generation). But at least it comes pre-signed to spare future dinosaur hunters the legal difficulties that I am apparently going to have to endure.
Here’s a fun game kids, how many typographical and/or scientific errors can you find in the license?
A Facebook friend posted a link to a YouTube video titled “Top Ten Creationist Arguments” by The Thinking Atheist. I had seen it before, it’s slickly produced and OK as far as it goes (though I would have a different list of 10 creationists arguments) but that’s not what got me going. In the video TTA gives a quote from the late Stephen Jay Gould:
This caught my eye because I have been researching stuff to do with philosophy of science, i.e. the testability of evolutionary theory and the difference between the so called experimental sciences and historical sciences. In particular I thought I had remembered reading a essay by Gould on the subject and I thought this quote might give me a lead on it. The problem is TTA doesn’t give a source for the quote. “No problem”, I thought, “I’ll just Google it and it should be a snap to find the source.” Bzzzt! Wrong. Oh if you Google the quote you’ll get a gillion links but none* of them give the source of the quote!
After a half and hour or so of Google mining I finally found a site that gave the source as Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995), but it provided no page number! So I pulled my copy off the shelf, blew the dust off the top (damn dust) and checked the index for references to creationism.
There were a couple and while Gould did say something like this in one part of the book referenced, it wasn’t an exact quote. Finally I went to Amazon.com and found that they allowed one to search the contents of the book, and at last I got the information I was looking for.
The quote appears on page 397 (of the 1st hardback edition) and is not one of the places listed in the index for the term creationism. Here it is with some context:
One tangential point before I leave this elegant study [a genetic study of certain crabs, see below - T.B.]. Creationists critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all (see the next essay for a fuller discussion of this important issue). This claim is rhetorical nonsense. How could one ask for a better test, based on a very risky prediction, than this? The counterintuitive link between king and hermit crabs was postulated on the basis of classical evidence from morphology (the arguments detailed previously in this essay as points 1-3). This prediction was then tested by the completely independent data set of DNA sequence comparisons — and confirmed in spades, with even closer propinquity than suspected between king crab and hermit crab lines.
I regard this story of king and hermit crabs as one of the most elegant I have learned of late in evolutionary biology–a lovely combination of a fascinating and counterintuitive tale; a multifaceted, rigorous and convincing pile of supporting data; and a lesson of intriguing generality (the difference between genealogical propinquity and any functional meaning of similarity–and the overriding importance of propinquity). (Gould 1995, p. 397, emphasis mine)
Great, curiosity satisfied!
So please, please, please, people, don’t just throw quote around willy-nilly. Give proper references. [I'll make an exception for T-shirts, but that's it!]
OK, I got that out of my system, end pedantic rant.
[* I didn't look at every single Google result so this is a rhetorical "none".]
Reference
Gould, Stephen Jay (1995) Dinosaur in a Haystack, Harmony Books, NY, 1st hardback edition
However it is not merely a pigeon that has shuffled off its mortal coil, tis a late pigeon that was once studied by Charles Darwin (Natural History Museum at Tring, Hertfordshire, England), making its image being shared here a matter of course. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
[Hat tip to Michael Barton at The Dispersal of Darwin.]
