Well, he’s only six weeks or so late, but finally Senator John McCain has followed Obama’s example and submitted a write-in response to Science Debate 2008’s 14 questions. As with Obama, I suspect McCain wasted none of his own time on this, but rather farmed it out to some staffer, who just plugged in canned position statements. So no big surprises to be found within.
Check out the picture on the right. This is just about the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.
That little dot in the upper lefthand corner is a planet orbiting another star. You got it: astronomers are now capable of photographing planets in solar systems similar to our own. Up to this point, determined researchers have been able to detect “exoplanets” by using a variety of clever methods; e.g. looking for a subtle periodic wobble in a star, which tells them a relatively big planet is tugging at it. Based on the period and extent of the wobble, they can deduce something about the mass and orbit of the unseen exoplanet.
Okay, I know this is way off topic, but… spiders are cool. I admit I would freak out if one got on me, but I can’t help but love ‘em.
The little guy (or gal, I suspect) on the right was camped out in an out-of-the-way corner of our front porch. (If you enlarge the pic and look at the top center you’ll see a piece of the little zigzaggy ladder, called a stabilimenta, that some spiders weave into their webs. Apparently spiders who weave such webs catch roughly one-third fewer bugs, but spiderologists (um, arachnologists?) think the web serves as a flight warning for birds, serving the same purpose as those flashing lights they put on the top of tall buildings. Anyway, it was a gorgeous spider but she disappeared after a couple of days. 
Check out this documentary film from director Markie Hancock, which details her struggle to leave evangelical Christianity behind. Let me know what you think about it.
Ever since Bill Clinton used Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” as a campaign theme song, I can’t help trying to think of pop tunes that match up with prominent political figures. We joked around a little bit in podcast #26 about Sarah Palin, so I decided fair’s fair - here are my picks for the 2008 Election Cycle Playlist. (more…)
Writer/activist Ayaan Hirshi Ali made a rare public appearance to accept the 2008 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for her biography Infidel. Ali, who has been deeply critical of Islam, especially its treatment of women, is under threat of death by her former co-religionists and has lived in seclusion for the last few years, only going out in public with armed guards.
Ed Buckner (currently Treasurer of the Atlanta Freethought Society) has been named the new president of American Atheists, Inc. He fills the position previous held by the legendary Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Ellen Johnson, and (Acting President) Frank R. Zindler. Ed has long been active in the freethought movement, including a stint as executive director for the Council for Secular Humanism.
One of my favorite dead TV shows is Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which was criminally cut short halfway through its first season. It got some justice with the well-received feature film Serenity, but there’s little hope we’ll see more adventures of Cap’n Mal and his cohorts.
Why am I telling you this? Because the legions of Firefly fans (who call themselves “Browncoats” and organize themselves into “Brigades”) are gettin’ their geek on for a good cause. Theatres around the world are sponsoring special screenings of Serenity, and the proceeds go to Joss (creator of Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) Whedon’s favorite cause: Equality Now, an organization that “works to end violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world through the mobilization of public pressure.”
Holy crap! Former Republican Congressman and current Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr has shaken up the “liberty movement” in a courageous (and as far as I know unprecedented) move to replace his VP running mate - the little-known Wayne Allyn Root - with former Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul.
If you’re reading this, it means the physicists running the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) haven’t blown up the world or sucked it away inside a miniature black hole. Yet.