Guardian Unlimited | Science | Don't dumb me down

Ben Goldacre Writes a column in the Guardian called "Bad Science"
This article describes how the media creates a straw man parody of science and uses that misrepresentation to belittle and criticize science and scientists.
Goldacre suggests that this reactionary tendency dates back to the reactions of the Romantic movement 200 years ago to science and empiricism. He suggests that part of the problem lies in the relative insignifigance of the Humanities when compared to scientific intellectual achevements. Journalists, he claims are jealous of the signifigant contributions to western civilization.
The dangerous implication here is that because science writers leave out the facts, they create an illusion that science is some kind of preisthood of experts and authorities. And nobody likes that sort of thing. Journalists set themselves up as oracular interpreters of the Delphic mutterings issuing from the ivory tower.

name

Courtship

Courtship
Originally uploaded by _william.on Flickr

Many years ago.

Drinking Problem

on Flickr

Tags: alchohol

Keeping Track Of People

M C WHEELER Born Sep 1923
366 BANTON AVE
EUGENE, OR 97404
(541) 607-6674

M C WHEELER
3760 CLAREY ST
EUGENE, OR 97402
(541) 607-1145

Google bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Google bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Miserable Failure

SEO wizardry or Popular opinion?

Googlebombing 'failure'

9/16/2005 12:54:00 PM
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web Products

If you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We've received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I'd like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.

Google's search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush's website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don't affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.

How many "Pranksters" does it take to cause a result like that?

found this at a gas staion om ninth street.

Places to contribute to katrina relief efforts

• Network for Good
• Humane Society
• Salvation Army
• Red Cross

Direct Relief

Direct relief Has a Blog on their page detailing the progress of various projects. They are working closley with community health centers and free clinics through out the region effected by Katrina.

Amber Silence

SOS '66

You have the right to remain silent.

Drowned City Poets

Drowned City Poets
You don't have to be fom there to have something to say.
DCP is a new blog for folks expressing their concern.
Comment wisely and Ill put you on the authors list.
I want free verse and relief references.
Local adress if possible.
Include an Email in your comments.

Katrina: giterdone

I was a bit despondent about the recent Hurricane.
I recieved a few Emails.
Encouragement.
I took some advice from Cara, and looked up relief efforts on craig’s list for my area.
You can do the same where ever you are.


Katrina relief:

• Habitat for Humanity
• Presbyterians
• NAACP

Heres a string on google that might get you started

Personal Musicology

On Ann Althouse’s Blog there are a few threads about
music from the sixties and early seventies One thread spins from her
reaction to a comment by Camile Paglia concerning Joni Mitchell. The
other thread Grew from a reaction to a DVD Althouse watched wherein
rock stars from the day were sitting around on the Dick Cavett show.
Just after Woodstock actually.

Really interesting Cultural discussion since some remember
seeing the original programs or concerts. One aspect of the discussion
had to do with hatred towards Hippies. This is a strong cultural theme.

If I’m not mistaken the term
“hippies” appeared when some West Coast bohemian
types wanted to differentiate themselves form the hordes of wannabees
who descended on their communities. According to the old beatniks they
were not the authentic hipsters. The new kids were little hipsters
hence the diminutive hippies.

Born at the tail end if the baby boom, I was exposed to most
of the music through the constant replay that went on. I remember two
Beatles songs on the radio My mother was a College Professor, so I got
a sort of capsule history imprinted on me at the time. The songs were
“Maxwell’s Silver Hammers” and Fixing a
Hole Where the Rain Gets in and Keeps my Mind from
Wandering..” I started wondering about Maxwell and who he
was. From her position as Dean of Anthropology at Stony Brook
University, my mother had a chance to observe the cultural wars first
hand. In fact she was a survivor of the cultural revolution which put
women through college and let them earn Doctoral degrees. It would be
difficult to characterize as liberal or conservative. She was part of
that generation that come of age during the second twentieth century
war. She liked music by Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and even Duke
Ellington. When I was a teenager, she let me borrow a fats Waller
record.

 

Protest songs were more the product of the Woody Guthrie and
Pete Seeger types.

Guthrie in particular was more of a “working class
hero. And Seeger wanted redress for pollution and racial inequality .
Those guys learned a lot about different peoples music and then used
music as a way to communicate Songs were addressed to specific
audiences about specific issues.

All these rock stars had big money behind them. I
don’t think they were that much different from Hip Hop and
Rap stars to day. Jefferson Airplanes “Volunteers.”
Was like this loud posturing thing. Socially corrosive bad music
fuelled by the rush of youth and a lust for money and power.

Some rock star hippies were more serious about their work. Bob
Dylan and Joni Mitchell come to mind, Although they have different
musical approaches, they put great value on the wordsmithing.

I had to do a Presentation for history class when I was in
High School in 1980. For various reasons I chose to cover the San
Francisco rock scene from 69 and 70. At the time I had been buying used
records and i pretty much shied a way from what was popular, So i had a
collection of offbeat weird sixties rock and i knew how to use it. The
professor expected each person to cover a band, so I picked a David
Crosby record called " If I Could Only Remember My Name...." Which had
All kinds of people on it. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, The Dead, Slick
and guys from Santana's band. It was a very irregular album excellent
at times. Used it to show that all these different bands had a common
belief that people could cooperate and work towards a common goal; in
this case a decent rock record that reflected the values of the artists
who contributed. I think they believed in Participatory Democracy. But
I’m sure that they smoked a fair pile of 'kind bud' while
they recorded the thing.

13000

Thirteen thousand visitors.

Drop in Bucket.

Worth a reprint

By Sidney Blumenthal
from 7610

In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.
Biblical in its uncontrolled rage and scope, Hurricane Katrina has left millions of Americans to scavenge for food and shelter and hundreds to thousands reportedly dead. With its main levee broken, the evacuated city of New Orleans has become part of the Gulf of Mexico. But the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature.

A year ago the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed to study how New Orleans could be protected from a catastrophic hurricane, but the Bush administration ordered that the research not be undertaken. After a flood killed six people in 1995, Congress created the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, in which the Corps of Engineers strengthened and renovated levees and pumping stations. In early 2001, the Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a report stating that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S., including a terrorist attack on New York City. But by 2003 the federal funding for the flood control project essentially dried up as it was drained into the Iraq war. In 2004, the Bush administration cut funding requested by the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for holding back the waters of Lake Pontchartrain by more than 80 percent. Additional cuts at the beginning of this year (for a total reduction in funding of 44.2 percent since 2001) forced the New Orleans district of the Corps to impose a hiring freeze. The Senate had debated adding funds for fixing New Orleans' levees, but it was too late.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which before the hurricane published a series on the federal funding problem, and whose presses are now underwater, reported online: "No one can say they didn't see it coming ... Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation."

The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge. In 1990, a federal task force began restoring lost wetlands surrounding New Orleans. Every two miles of wetland between the Crescent City and the Gulf reduces a surge by half a foot. Bush had promised "no net loss" of wetlands, a policy launched by his father's administration and bolstered by President Clinton. But he reversed his approach in 2003, unleashing the developers. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency then announced they could no longer protect wetlands unless they were somehow related to interstate commerce.

In response to this potential crisis, four leading environmental groups conducted a joint expert study, concluding in 2004 that without wetlands protection New Orleans could be devastated by an ordinary, much less a Category 4 or 5, hurricane. "There's no way to describe how mindless a policy that is when it comes to wetlands protection," said one of the report's authors. The chairman of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality dismissed the study as "highly questionable," and boasted, "Everybody loves what we're doing."

"My administration's climate change policy will be science based," President Bush declared in June 2001. But in 2002, when the Environmental Protection Agency submitted a study on global warming to the United Nations reflecting its expert research, Bush derided it as "a report put out by a bureaucracy," and excised the climate change assessment from the agency's annual report. The next year, when the EPA issued its first comprehensive "Report on the Environment," stating, "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment," the White House simply demanded removal of the line and all similar conclusions. At the G-8 meeting in Scotland this year, Bush successfully stymied any common action on global warming. Scientists, meanwhile, have continued to accumulate impressive data on the rising temperature of the oceans, which has produced more severe hurricanes.

In February 2004, 60 of the nation's leading scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, warned in a statement, "Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking": "Successful application of science has played a large part in the policies that have made the United States of America the world's most powerful nation and its citizens increasingly prosperous and healthy ... Indeed, this principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle ... The distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends must cease." Bush completely ignored this statement.

In the two weeks preceding the storm in the Gulf, the trumping of science by ideology and expertise by special interests accelerated. The Federal Drug Administration announced that it was postponing sale of the morning-after contraceptive pill, despite overwhelming scientific evidence of its safety and its approval by the FDA's scientific advisory board. The United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa accused the Bush administration of responsibility for a condom shortage in Uganda -- the result of the administration's evangelical Christian agenda of "abstinence." When the chief of the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the Justice Department was ordered by the White House to delete its study that African-Americans and other minorities are subject to racial profiling in police traffic stops and he refused to buckle under, he was forced out of his job. When the Army Corps of Engineers' chief contracting oversight analyst objected to a $7 billion no-bid contract awarded for work in Iraq to Halliburton (the firm at which Vice President Cheney was formerly CEO), she was demoted despite her superior professional ratings. At the National Park Service, a former Cheney aide, a political appointee lacking professional background, drew up a plan to overturn past environmental practices and prohibit any mention of evolution while allowing sale of religious materials through the Park Service.

On the day the levees burst in New Orleans, Bush delivered a speech in Colorado comparing the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Franklin D. Roosevelt: "And he knew that the best way to bring peace and stability to the region was by bringing freedom to Japan." Bush had boarded his very own "Streetcar Named Desire."

Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton and the author of "The Clinton Wars," is writing a column for Salon and the Guardian of London.

The Truth Laid Bear

My Ecosystem Details

Heating the Brew: Acid and Hydrogen Peroxide in a copper pot. (always wear safety glasses.)

Silver blossoms

Brin on Earth Predictions

What's weird is that EARTH now has at least thirteen major predictive hits, so far. Some of them technological, some social. Web pages, blogging, independent micro-camera use, subvocal voiced input, privacy wars, worries about human-generated singularities, animal habitat refuges, political activism by associations of low lying countries, accelerated global warming that results in worsening storm seasons, a Patagonia land boom, widespread self-editing of news input, the decline of delivered mail... and now this. (Can any of you think of any others?) Starting to get weird.

Children under a blanket

This is a card that I scanned.

Aftermath

I’m one frustrated person.

I can’t do ANY thing for people in New Orleans.

They might as well live in Southeast Asia:

Or central Florida

The sad fact is that FEMA is a sham now. Now under homeland security, this agency rewards the victims of catastrophes according to their wealth and political allegiances.

The poor who were unable to leave the city now face anarchy.

The destructive wake of Hurricane Katrina also leaves us with less oil refineries.

We Floridians are in a position to build more refineries and wells.

Hurricanes destroy refineries and offshore wells.

Crappy options.