Whee! A skeptic on bloggingheads.tv! If you haven’t checked out bloggingheads.tv (co-founded by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal) yet, I highly recommend it (although, the video version can be a real time-waster; best to opt for the audio-only podcast version).
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. 
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.
First up, what does the selection of Sarah Palin for the Republican presidential ticket mean for the cause of secular government in America? (Spoiler Alert: It won’t be good.)
Next, we offer a wrap-up of the extremely successful Skeptics Track at this year’s Dragon*Con. If you were in attendance, send an email to dragoncon@dragoncon.org and let them know what a fantastic job Track Director Derek Colanduno did.
Plus: A special, super-secret guest panelist joins us for the first (and hopefully not the last) time!
[Apologies for the sound glitch at the very beginning. The theme music overpowers the voice track, but it only lasts a few seconds.]
Presenting our first-ever live episode, recorded August 30th at Dragon*Con as part of the Skeptics programming track, directed by Derek Colanduno of Skepticality fame. (Derek’s pod-partner Swoopy directed Dragon*Con’s Podcasting track.)
Science Debate 2008 reports that Senator Barack Obama has answered their 14 questions, and they say Senator John McCain has promised to answer them. Half a loaf is better than none, I suppose, but they didn’t call this thing Science Mail-In Questionnaire 2008. With less than two months before the election a REAL SD2008 is looking exceedingly unlikely.
Point #1: When abstinence-only education fails, what’s Plan B? Oh yeah, there’s no Plan B.
I have no idea what to make of the rumors floating around that Palin’s fifth child is actually her grandchild. Whether or not it’s true is largely immaterial to me; it’s a family matter. Nonetheless, if it turns out it is true and if it turns out the Palins concealed this truth from McCain’s vetting committee…
More problematic is the new revelation that Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and that she plans to marry the boyfriend who is the father. Again, this would normally be a family matter I would care nothing about, but… this is a governor who advocates abstinence only sex education in public schools. (more…)
PZ Myers - We talk to the University of Minnesota Morris biologist and author of the popular science blog Pharyngula [scienceblogs.com/pharyngula]. Dr. Myers is an atheist whose outspokenness often raises the hackles of fundamentalists. His recent missives on the controversy centering on University of Central Florida student Webster Cook’s “stealing” of a Eucharist wafer has brought him to the attention of Blowhard Bill Donahue and his Catholic League.
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