There’s an interesting exchange over at the Reality-Based Community around the topic of “earmarks” for science, like the grizzly bear DNA study McCain keeps mocking. Michael O’Hare argues that science should not be funded by earmarks: Almost any piece of scientific research, especially in biology, that isn’t called “Cure cancer!” is liable to the kind […]
Month: September 2008
Awesome Dragon Baby Blogging
SteelyKid has a new friend, courtesy of my sister: It’s a shlumpy google-eyed dragon, stuffed with pure awesome. I’m dubbing this guy “Wellington,” for family-historical reasons. A side shot (with extra bonus baby in the mirror) is below the fold:
links for 2008-09-28
Editors for Obama : Editors for Obama Change in which we can believe. (tags: language education silly internet)
Stochastic Baby Blogging
Here’s an update to the SteelyKid feeding pattern, with almost twice as much data as the previous graph: Still no solid pattern to the feedings, time-wise, but there has been some change, in that the individual feedings have gotten more distinct. They tend to be longer, and the intervals between feeding are somewhat longer.
Big-Picture Debate Commentary
As I said last night, I wound up watching all of the presidential debate. I turned it on expecting to get disgusted and flip away in half an hour or so, but it was remarkably better than the last two elections’ worth of debates. Almost as if both participants were qualified to be President. I’m […]
links for 2008-09-27
Primer: TV Detectives | The A.V. Club "A brief history of–and notable highlights from–television’s long-term love affair with procedurals, mystery stories, and the colorful characters who figure out whodunit." (tags: television review culture avclub)
Everything That Is Wrong With American Political Culture
God help me, I watched all of the debate tonight. I’m not sure why, but I did, and I’ll say something about it in an overall sense tomorrow. It occurs to me, though, that one moment after the debate sums up everything that has gone wrong with this country over the last N years. I […]
Baseball Statistics Are Crap
October is almost upon us, which means that we’ve been subjected to a bunch of long segments on Mike & Mike about baseball. These serve to remind me just how little use I have for baseball, and baseball statistics. I’ve long thought that baseball fans are stat-obsessed dorks, but my opinion changed somewhat when I […]
Getting Through the Debates
At the time of this writing, it’s still not clear whether the scheduled presidential debate will take place this evening. If you’d like to be prepared, just in case, here are a couple of links that might help you get through it: FreePress.net is offering a “Rate the Debates” service, where you can sign up […]
links for 2008-09-26
Good Math, Bad Math : How Mortgages Turned into a Trillion Dollar Disaster "The question is, if mortgages are at the root of the current economic disaster, how can it possibly result in close to a trillion dollars worth of losses?" (tags: US politics humanities math diversity stupid) Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » Trade […]