Moved!

I've switched the feed to the new blog - Migrations, where there'll be less irate ranting and more dialogue, I hope.

Read more!

Migrations is moving, once and for all

First off, welcome to those visiting from Nature's science blog piece and Jose's interview on Meme Therapy.

As you may have noticed though, Migrations is offline, yet again - and I'm trying to get the extended feed from the Blogates domain, and import it to the actual Wordpress domain.

Please be patient while I make the change, and then add the 3 posts I typed up over the weekend while it was down. Thanks.

P.S. If you're feeling as impatient about the Migrations problems as I am, feel free to email the domain/server administrator, and *politely but firmly* ask him to get his butt moving:
mypatricks@gmail.com

I've emailed him 4 or 5 times since it went down a few days ago, with no response. How unprofessional!

Read more!

The Washington Post swings still further to the insane Right

Anti-science strawman quotes from the fundamentalist editorial on stem cells at the Washington Post:

• Cloning will always be morally corrupt...


• But perhaps we will simply "update" basic medical ethics as well, and decide that the "good of mankind" trumps the good of individual patients.


• We have seen where this amoral logic leads us -- to shameful abuses of research subjects...


• What will be next? Probably proposals for "fetal farming" -- the gestation of human embryos to later developmental stages, when potentially more useful stabilized stem cells can be obtained and organ primordia can be "harvested."


• Over and over again, scientists and ethicists say: Here and no farther. And then they seek to go farther, in the name of "progress."


• In the end, the lesson of the cloning scandal is not simply that specific research guidelines were violated; it is that human cloning, even for research, is so morally problematic that its practitioners will always be covering their tracks, especially as they try to meet the false expectations of miraculous progress that they have helped create.

And the justification for these strawmen? Defrocked South Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk - surpise surprise.

Check out the Give Up Blog for an even better response.

Read more!

It's nice to be mentioned

Nature, yes, the journal Nature, has mentioned me in the top 50 science blogs list (at 36). It's only #36, I know, but it's nice to be mentioned at all, and I'm surprised that to see that they (using Technorati) ranked me above some very excellent science blogs.

So it's a shame that I'm doing most of my science-blogging at Migrations now, and that the site is down for maintenance until 2-20hrs from now, but that is where my "muse" has lead me.

Read more!

Migrations is back

Ah... finally, Migrations is back online. I'll stay at Blogates, but I'm backing everything up, with every intention of switching to TypePad at the first hint of another unannounced week-long server outage.
(July 5th) - it's down again. I'm moving to TypePad.
Okay. It's about an hour after the site started to go down, but the server/domain admin has given me a 4-24hr ETA on the Blogates site recovery, which is acceptable.

As long as such downtimes aren't half a week long, keeping me in the dark all the time, I can deal with it.

Read more!

Will blog for food

Ok, Not really, but I do feel homeless when it comes to Migrations(the server has been down 75 hours now), which is where my blogging-heart lies lately.

So, I've started looking for a new blog host - preferably a Wordpress-based blog, since I've grown attached to having categories. Any suggestions for where to go?

Also, I wonder what chance I'll have to transfer my old Migrations posts to a new site - will I have to re-enter the posts manually?

Read more!

The Design Inference: A "Science-stopper"

In brief - Allen MacNeill's Evolution and Design course seems to have started out well, with good participation in the comments section.

On his own blog, Allen takes Hannah to task for her description of Dembski's "Explanatory Filter" and her application of a "'science stopper' of the first order" in Inference and the Boundaries of Science. I wonder if the IDers will ever acknowledge this problem, which is at the heart of ID's lack of falsifiability. As Allen put it:

...while it is a good idea to "not reject explanations for lack of warrant, bu never reject the investigation a priori", the point I was trying to make in my reply was that if one can't get by the first branch point in the "explanatory filter" I posited during the discussion, then we can't really do science at all. Furthermore, agreeing that the remains of what looks like a house fire could have been created ex nihilo by a sufficiently powerful entity gets us absolutely nowhere in terms of explaining the origin of the wreckage. In fact, it forestalls the possibility of any kind of empirically verifiable (or falsifiable) hypothesis, and is therefore a "science stopper" of the first order.

Read more!

Apologies

To those wondering what's up with my other blog, Migrations, which I've been focusing on in the past month, and has been having server issues (splog filtering, mainly) the past 2+ days - my apologies.

I've gotten no estimate on when things will return to normal, only a reassurance that it will be as soon as possible.

I admit, I'm getting a bit frustrated at the delay, and thinking that this had better be the last problem with the Blogates server for a long time to come. On the other hand, the Blogates staff (mostly one person) has just welcomed a new baby into the world, and he certainly seems like a nice guy, so I'm trying to cut him some slack.

But if there's no new info by tomorrow on what's causing the delay or when it'll be fixed... Grrr...

And on the good side, I have three posts completely written (in notepad) and ready for posting, with a fourth on the way. Yippee!

Update: GRRRRRR - Migration is still down, with no estimate when the splog filtering will be complete, and I've had enough. I feel stuck, however, because my previous posts on there are not completely backed up, and I can't transfer them to another domain until Blogates is back and working.

Read more!

Rapanos decision out

Well, the SCOTUS has their decision (or non-decision, rather) out on Rapanos et ux., et al, v. United States, and The Island of Doubt has an well-said commentary on how each ruling -- plurality, dissent and the determining in-between judgment -- treated the science involved, in this case which sought to clarify what waters are protected by the Clean Water Act.

Read more!

Habits of Mind and science literacy

Migrations: The Habits of Mind post is up (I got around to it sooner than I thought I would). Looking back over the post, perhaps the most important thinking skill described was:

Critical-response Skills: "In various forms, the mass media, teachers, and peers inundate students with assertions and arguments, some of them in the realm of science, mathematics, and technology. Education should prepare people to read or listen to such assertions critically, deciding what evidence to pay attention to and what to dismiss, and distinguishing careful arguments from shoddy ones. Furthermore, people should be able to apply those same critical skills to their own observations, arguments, and conclusions, thereby becoming less bound by their own prejudices and rationalizations. Although most people cannot be expected to become experts in technical fields, everyone can learn to detect the symptoms of doubtful assertions and arguments."

Anyway, I'm not sure how coherent I was, so stop by and let me know what you think.

Read more!