Hello folks.

I’ve been pretty busy the last couple weeks, but I managed to find time to edit and upload another episode of the Mindcast, and do a little poking around the format to see how I could improve it a little. First, I found the absence of clear hyperlinks a nuisance, so now they appear with underlines. Then, as i was investigating what’s going on at the server end of things, I noticed a couple really cool things. Read More…

Episode 72 of the Mindcast is up!

Download it here. Read More…

At the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips celebrates castrates castigates lightly prods Richard Dawkins in an incredibly informative article. No, not very informative about the subject at hand, but about the author’s own perverse postmodernist view of reality and how best to go about explaining it. Oh yes, just let me whip out my enzyme and it’s time for some Monday Madness. Read More…

Wow, talk about a time delay on news. I’ve got to get used to this happening more often. I moved across the country, and what would have been local news plastered everywhere is something that I instead have to dig up to find. I heard that a radio talk show host from KGO AM 810 in San Francisco died last month. Read More…

I’m coming a little late with this commentary. A week ago, the science blogs were abuzz about the extinction of the Baiji (Beiji), or Yangtze/Chinese River Dolphin. Found in only the Yangtze River in China, the Baiji was first decimated by hunting during humanity’s Great Leap Forward. The period of time, about 50,000 years ago, when we experienced a huge growth in population, culture, knowledge, and spread further across the world. Since then, hunting, irresponsible fishing, clumsy boating, and habitat reduction have limited the population of this species, giving rise to many conservation efforts. Read More…

Richard Dawkins is continuing his presence on TV, this time with a documentary called The Enemies of Reason. I just watched two clips of it, about astrology and the paranormal.

The show looks pretty good, and just the thing that we need to see more in our culture. Constant questioning, challenging and debunking of irrationality. Read More…

Episode 71 of the Mindcast is up!

Download it here. Read More…

I just took a survey on public vs private in blogging. It was hard to define public and private in the context of blogging, but it was a well-spent 30 minutes, I think. It’s being done by a graduate student who is studying the concept of blogging. If anyone’s interested in taking it as well, here’s the link:
Bloggers, stand up and be counted! Take the “Public and Private in the Blogosphere” Survey!

A taxi cab in San Francisco was marked with the number ‘666,’ and its driver believed that this “mark of the beast” was responsible for several “calamities” that befell him. The biggest calamity was when he tried to get his number changed by the Taxi Cab Commission and had his request overwhelmingly denied, to his embarrassment. What’s also interesting is that he tried to rid himself of the ‘curse’ by having his cab blessed. That sounds like an interesting battle of beliefs… guess which one won in his mind?

Seriously, ‘666′ comes up once every thousand numbers, twice if you count the fact that ‘999′ is just ‘666′ upside-down. What, you think which way is up or down matters to the devil? The power ascribed to those numbers is real, but it is the power of a person’s own psychology to trick themselves into believing that the forces of evil in this world actively avoid messing with things that don’t have an arbitrary number slapped on the side.
You know, it’s strange to find skeptical allies in a Taxi Cab Commission, but hey, I’ll take it. Hat tip to Chris Hoofnagle at the Denialism blog for digging it up.

There’s an idea that has been floating around the science blogosphere lately. It has hit several major blogs, and has incited several reactions from bloggers that it has hit. In my own arena, I’ve experienced a similar reaction to my podcast in iTunes. For this week’s edition of Monday Madness - I’ll have my scientists one-dimensional and without opinions, please!

Let’s start with what I first noticed. The first review I got of the Mindcast in the iTunes directory: Read More…