#50234: Mikko Sandt — 11/22  at  10:47 AM
Don't forget this:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,176354,00.html

"A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies."

"The KU faculty has had enough," said Paul Mirecki, department chairman.

"Creationism is mythology," Mirecki said. "Intelligent design is mythology. It's not science. They try to make it sound like science. It clearly is not."

John Calvert, an attorney and managing director of the Intelligent Design Network in Johnson County, said Mirecki will go down in history as a laughingstock.

"To equate intelligent design to mythology is really an absurdity, and it's just another example of labeling anybody who proposes (intelligent design) to be simply a religious nut," Calvert said. "That's the reason for this little charade."

Mirecki said his course, limited to 120 students, would explore intelligent design as a modern American mythology. Several faculty members have volunteered to be guest lecturers, he said."

#50236: — 11/22  at  10:52 AM
OT: PZ, wanna expose a bigoted kook?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65772,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

This is Judith Reisman's site: http://www.drjudithreisman.com/

At the front page she links to http://www.savethemales.ca/

At the reference page ( http://www.drjudithreisman.com/reference.html ) she links to that site again.

Makow is a first-class antisemite. Just search for "Protocols" on his site:

http://tinyurl.com/d7abs

And, of course, "Illuminati", "Zionists", etc....

#50244: jfaberuiuc — 11/22  at  11:25 AM
Not to go off on a tangent, or secant, or something like that, but at a recent physics demonstration for high schoolers, the UIUC physics van demonstration group were actually handing out The Cartoon Guide to Physics. The same author also does genetics, and the history of the universe, which includes evolution.

#50248: Kristine Harley — 11/22  at  11:40 AM
From the Fox News link: "John Calvert, an attorney and managing director of the Intelligent Design Network in Johnson County, said [Paul] Mirecki [who is teaching intelligent design only as a mythology] will go down in history as a laughingstock."

I welcome arrogant "predictions" such as this. The IDers must be pretty confident of themselves, but let's see just who exactly goes down in history as a laughingstock!

#50249: MBains — 11/22  at  11:40 AM
I haven't checked in for a while Prof. Do you know that at least one editor at the Seattle Times thinks you're a Scientific McCarthyist?

Or maybe just a kind of Vince Lombardiesque character:

This month, NPR reported on behavior seemingly right out of the P.Z. Myers playbook.

I guess I still think of you as a knowledgable Professor with some awesome bug-porn, alot of integrity and an elevated intolerance for IDiots with power.

Different strokes eh... Go Get 'Em Coach!

#50254: — 11/22  at  11:49 AM
http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/11/22/intelligent.design.course.ap/index.html

John Calvert, an attorney and managing director of the Intelligent Design Network in Johnson County, Kansas, said Mirecki will go down in history as a laughingstock.

"To equate intelligent design to mythology is really an absurdity, and it's just another example of labeling anybody who proposes (intelligent design) to be simply a religious nut," Calvert said. "That's the reason for this little charade."

A "religious nut"? Maybe. I'd call someone who insists that the activities of his deity can be studied scientifically in the year 2005 just a tad nutty.

But how about "a despicable lying cretin"? Definitely.

John Calvert is a despicable lying cretin of the lowest order. And a coward, of course, because he's afraid to step forward and defend himself beyond issuing self-serving soundbites to the media.

University Chancellor Robert Hemenway said Monday he didn't know all the details about the new course.

"If it's a course that's being offered in a serious and intellectually honest way, those are the kind of courses a university frequently offers," he said.

Hahahhahhahahaha!!!! God bless Robert Hemenway. That is the fxcking funniest thing I've heard in quite a while.

This is truly the middle of the end for the ID peddling charlatans.

They begged and begged and begged us to "teach the controversy". Guess what? We're teaching the controversy! And Calvert -- like Gish, Hovind, Behe, Dembski and Luskin -- will be depicted for the objectively pathetic lying idiot that he is. Just another sad and obscure historical figure with egg plastered on his face.

#50257: — 11/22  at  11:52 AM
This month, NPR reported on behavior seemingly right out of the P.Z. Myers playbook.

Get ready for Nathan Newman to lead the backlash, PZ!

You don't want to anger those rubes by ridiculing them. They'll show up at the polls and vote in Republicans. Look what happened in Dover in response to those Mike Argento articles.

Oh, wait ...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!

#50274: Bob Dowling — 11/22  at  01:01 PM

Not to go off on a tangent, or secant, or something like that,

I think flying off at a normal should be the appropriate expression for flying off in completely the wrong direction. It's at 90 degrees to the tangent, though still in the plane of curvature of the curve we're taking tangents and normals to. There's a word for the line at right angles to both of these but I've forgotten it.

Damn, I like being a geek.

#50275: — 11/22  at  01:06 PM
Who was the expert witness at Dover who argued that we needed affirmative action for crackpots? It struck me as the only part of the testimoney that might conceivably work in favor of the defendants. As far as I know, there is no constitutional prohibition against giving crackpots an even break as long as they're not religious crackpots.

#50283: jfaberuiuc — 11/22  at  01:24 PM
Hi Bob, the missing vector in 3-dimensions is the binormal. I like that terminology, I'll have to use it amongst physics-oriented crowds at some point. Thanks for the tip.

#50284: — 11/22  at  01:24 PM

I think flying off at a normal should be the appropriate expression for flying off in completely the wrong direction.

I suspect it wouldn't be hard to convince a lot of people that a ball on a string does fly off at normal (away from the center) when the string breaks. The notion of centrifugal (*) force is part of popular currency in a way that conservation of momentum is not, so unless you've built your intuition by playing with real balls and strings, it would be easy to get it wrong.

I only mention this as an example of how wrong human intuition can be about even the simplest science. For some reason, though, nobody ever wants to "teach the controversy" over this. Go figure.

Seriously, the one place I am dying to teach the controversy is the strange dogma of high school French teachers that you don't pronounce consonants at the end of words. I mean, sorry dude but that's just messed up.

(*) Yes, as the kool kids all know, this is really a "fictitious" force "that appears to act on an object when its motion is viewed from a rotating frame of reference. This "force" is actually inertia, which is not a force at all."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_force

#50291: — 11/22  at  01:49 PM
Why am I reminded of this Amptoon?

#50325: — 11/22  at  05:01 PM
Seattle Times continues after the Sternberg/McCarthy piece with more of the stuff PZ has shot down already:

"Moreover, a growing list of some 450 Ph.D. scientists are openly skeptical of Darwin's theory, and a recent poll by the Louis Finkelstein Institute found that only 40 percent of medical doctors accept Darwinism's idea that humans evolved strictly through unguided, material processes."

So they know his opinion, but don't know what he is saying. The usual modern journalism professionalism.