Personally, I prefer Picnik, but Aviary.com has a neat little trick for taking screenshots of web pages. Just add Aviary.com/ before the URL, and it will create a screenshot of the webpage. For example, http://aviary.com/brian.carnell.com will take a screenshot of the home page of this site.
The Freedom from Religion Foundation has created quite a controversy with its atheist billboard campaigns, like this one,
Of course half the fun with these sorts of campaigns is getting people outraged at what is, frankly, a fairly tame message. The billboards are certainly no more confrontational or in-your-face than religious-themed billboards (though, in general, I find billboards to be an eyesore).
Nice project making a bookmark patterned on the face hugger from the Alien films.
EyeOS is an open source project to create a browser-based OS that you can host on your own server(s).
It is mainly written in PHP, XML, and Javascript. It acts as a platform for web applications written using the eyeos Toolkit. It includes a Desktop environment with 67 applications and system utilities. It is accessible by portable devices via its mobile front end. eyeos lets you upload your files and work with them no matter where you are. It contains applications like Word Processor, Address Book, PDF reader, and many more developed by the community.
It is already a fairly full-featured system, but there’s a nice roadmap for a January 2010 2.0 release that will include a nice-looking collaborative document editing feature among other things.
Since there can never be enough Star Wars merchandise (apparently), Star Wars flash drives seemed the obvious way for Lucascorp to go. Along with Yoda, a Boba Fett, C-3PO, Darth Vader and others will be available in October 2009. Unfortunately there was a bug in the Han Solo version — it turned out you had to insert the Greedo flash drive first before it would work.
Awesome 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea cake seen over at GeekCrafts.
Uncharted Seas is a miniatures game depicting “naval tactical combat set in a world of high fantasy.” That means fleets of Iron Dwarves facing off against Orc Raider fleets. Very clever premise.
Technology Review has a story on the first drug demonstrated to expand the lifespan of a mammalian species. In this case, rapamycin was administered late in the life of mice and extend lifespan by an average of 9 percent in males and 13 percent in females.
According to TR, rapamycin is already approved in the United States for use as an immunosuppressive drug for organ transplant recipients and is being tested for its potential to treat cancer.
The drug may act as a chemical form of caloric restriction, the only other method known to significantly extend lifespan in mice,
Experts believe it’s possible that rapamycin may tap into one of the same biochemical pathways as calorie restriction, an intervention long known to make mice live longer. While the drug was not as effective as a limited diet initiated early in life, it was far more powerful than a limited diet begun at the same advanced age. In ongoing studies, the researchers are testing different doses across a range of starting ages; an optimal combination may ultimately prove more potent than calorie restriction.
That would certainly be nice.
Not a fan of anything Harry Potter related, but this t-shirt is clever,
For the past few days, PZ Myers and Chris Mooney have been going at it on their respective blogs over Mooney’s new book Unscientific America. I haven’t read Mooney’s book, but apparently it includes a chapter that is uncharitable toward Myers and other so-called “New Atheists.” Myers argues that Mooney’s book is “useless”, while Mooney has decried Myers’ alleged distortions of his claims in Unscientific America.
So far the debate has been marked by Myers raising substantive objections to Unscientific America followed by Mooney either changing the subject or urging interested parties to go read the book. However, there was a telling exchange between Myers and Mooney over at Daily Kos which cast Mooney in an extremely unfavorable light.
In the comments section of a review of UA, a commenter accuses Mooney of distorting the views of Richard Dawkins. The commenter quotes Myers’ critique of UA,
Following this, he proceeds to damn the “New Atheists” for “collapsing the distinction” between methodological and philosophical naturalism, and argues that Dawkins is taking a philosophical position and misusing science to claim it “entirely precludes God’s existence.”
This would be a misrepresentation of Dawkins’ views. Dawkins has written that he thinks the existence of God is a scientific question, and while Dawkins thinks the existence of God is highly improbable, absolute certainty on the question is impossible. Not to worry, though, Mooney replies that this is just another one of those distortions of UA from Myers,
we use that phrase
although it is not attributed to dawkins.
i’ve read dawkins book in some detail, and our objection is to his making god’s existence a scientific question. i realize he does not ascribe full certainty to his atheistic conclusion–but he claims he can reason scientifically about god’s existence. we’re saying that a lot of theologians, philosophers, etc, would say that’s a category error.
i really have to ask that you read our book, rather than its misrepresentation in skewed reviews.
by Chris Mooney on Sun July 12, 2009 at 07:05:48 AM PDT
Well that sucks — you’d hope Myers and the New Atheists wouldn’t go around distorting Mooney’s views. Except, well, they’re not as Myers notes in reply to Mooney,
Yes, you did (13+ / 0-)
Tsk, tsk, Chris. Here’s the quote in context.
But much like the anti-evolutionists do, the New Atheists often seek to collapse the distinction between methodological and philosophical naturalism. In The God Delusion, for instance, Richard Dawkins makes the dubious claim that the existence of God is, as he puts it, “unequivocally a scientific question.” Quite a lot of philosophers — and scientists — would disagree. It is one thing to say that scientific norms and practices preclude ascribing any explanatory force to God in, say, the movement of atoms, or the function of DNA. It’s quite another to say they entirely preclude God’s existence. In rejecting God or any other supernatural entity, Dawkins is taking a philosophical position.
You unequivocally assign that view to Dawkins. He’s the only person you mention, twice, in that paragraph, and you are using him as your sole example of the attitude you are trying to illustrate.
Your comment is remarkable in that not only do you claim it is others that are misrepresenting your views, but right here you are misrepresenting what you actually said. My paragraph is a very accurate summation of what you wrote.
Mooney then concedes the point,
PZ,
I’ve looked at the passage again (should have been a lot more careful before), and you are right–and I made an error. It does clearly ascribe this view to Dawkins.Now that I’ve read your criticism on your blog, I think “entirely preclude” states too strongly Dawkins’ position, and we should have been more nuanced here. However he does still try to claim that God’s existence is a scientific question.
Thanks for catching this.
by ChrisMooney on Sun July 12, 2009 at 01:35:59 PM PDT
Wow. What a dunderhead.
And leaving aside Mooney’s confusion about his own damn book, for a book about scientific illiteracy to suggest that part of the solution is to simply wall off this or that particular problem as beyond scientific investigation is insane.
