Wellington Arkell and insanely hot wings...

... ordered from a local bar and then doused liberally in Frank's Red Hot*.

There's really no better way to celebrate a decent job offer.

(*the wings, that is. The Arkell is just fine on its own.)

Why the media give slimy, lying con-men credibility

Timely for me, in wake of my own recent foaming over the subject, CSICOP does a piece on just why it is the slimesucking twits pushing 'intelligent design' get press:

In the article, we note that as school boards, state legislatures, and the courts pay increasing attention to the claims of the ID movement, journalists rely heavily on the agenda of these political venues to guide coverage decisions. As a consequence, there is a rise in media attention to ID, but perhaps more importantly, as science is debated within these policy arenas, there is a transfer across news beats, with coverage no longer dominated by context-oriented science writers, and instead the subject of stories contributed by political reporters, opinion writers, and TV journalists. We reached this conclusion after systematically reading through seventeen months of recent news coverage at national and local newspapers, conducting an analysis of opinion page content at the papers, and reviewing relevant TV news transcripts.

As this shift in news beats takes place, coverage de-emphasizes the type of technical backgrounder favored by science writers. These context-oriented articles typically highlight accurately the overwhelming scientific consensus in support of evolution. In contrast, political reporters and television news correspondents are more likely to cover the issue through the lens of political strategy and gamesmanship. Though these types of stories provide important details about the tactics, fundraising, and communication strategies of the ID movement, they often also ignore scientific background, and instead carefully balance arguments from both sides, thereby lending credibility to the claim by ID proponents that there is a growing “controversy” over evolutionary theory.

— CSICOP, Understanding Bias in Coverage of Intelligent Design

So who wants to spring for free remedial courses in evolutionary biology, comparative genetics and natural history for any political reporter stupid enough to even bother talking to Hovind?

Taubenberger et al

Alternate title: Weekly harbinger of doom, redux.

In this week's Nature, Taubenberger et al, 'Characterization of the 1918 influenza virus polymerase genes'...

In this week's Science, 'Hey, guys, y'know that virus that killed 50 million people? We just re-created it!'

Erm...

What could possibly go wrong?

The beauty of a perfect wall

Been painting our bedroom, last few days. Or, rather, prepping it for painting.

I been 'round a while, painted more than a few things in my life. And when I do prep, I do prep. Take a few days at least for a decent sized room: rake the loose plaster out of cracks and seams against moulding, tighten up ducts coming into the walls, replace louvres as necessary, tape all the cracks and then mud the tape, use good wood filler in gaps in the moulding (old house, there's always lots of these), mud everything including every little ding as often as it takes to get a good buildup and fill in shrinkage, feather-sand 'til every edge is invisible, then go heavy with the white-tinted shellac to seal it all up tight...

Yeah, you wind up with nostrils full of plaster dust, a head full of alcohol fumes (from the shellac, people)... But durn, when you're done, there's nothing like a perfect wall. Bedroom's the last thing I've done in this place; always a challenge getting to it when there always seems to be someone or several someones asleep in there—young kids, that's how it goes...

Finally got to it, prep's almost done now, and we've decided it's going a really dramatic, dark red, white trim. Gonna be sharp.

Kinda neat

From their vantage point in a clearing at Mbeli Bai in the northern Republic of Congo, Breuer and his colleagues spotted a female gorilla, called Leah, studying a pond before venturing a few steps into it. She then turned back and grabbed a handy metre-long branch from the bank, which she proceeded to use as a 'walking stick', repeatedly prodding the pond's bottom with it. After apparently assessing the depth of the pond with each prod, she eventually moved almost 10 metres from the shore.

...

The researchers saw another female, Efi, using the trunk of a dead shrub as a bridge to cross swampy ground. Efi ripped the 1.3-metre-long, 5-centimetre-wide section from the ground and leant on it like a crutch while she trawled the marshy ground for food. Then she laid it down like a plank and strode over it.

— Gorillas branch out into tool use in Nature