Dawkins eats pieces of shit like this for breakfast

What a fruit loop.

Francis Collins

God I love Sam Harris. This meticulous blasting of Francis Collins is about the best thing I've ever read. Collins' The Language of God is an indescribably awful book (well, maybe not indescribable--Harris does a pretty good job of describing how bad it is, actually), and his appointment to head the NIH is terrifying.

Holy shit; I just reread Harris's essay, and I can't believe how thoroughly he blows Collins out of the water! How delightful. :)

Feynman videos

There's been a lot of buzz about Bill Gates' purchasing some of Richard Feynman's videos and making them available online for free (well, "free"--if you install Silverlight). Anyway, it had me jonesing for some hot Feynman action, so here is a series of 13 excellent "Fun to Imagine" videos:



And here are his excellent Messenger Lectures from 1964.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson "rebukes" Richard Dawkins

Neil DeGrasse Tyson here gently points out that Dawkins' acerbic style may be somewhat antithetical to his position as Professor for Public Understanding of Science. Dawkins' response is good-humoured and classic.

Sixty Symbols

This cool set of short videos from the University of Nottingham provides descriptions of 60 symbols used in physics and astronomy. (Well, almost 60 symbols--they apparently had to stretch a bit, as they included things like Schrödinger's Cat and the human brain.) My favorite constants? Probably the fine-structure constant and the Schwarzchild radius. Feigenbaum's constant is pretty cool, too.



This same group (mostly) also did a cool set of videos on the each of the elements in the periodic table.

Blue birds ain't blue (but they ARE dinosaurs)

Cool: This guy (Richard Prum) taught my evolution course at the University of Kansas. In this week's episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast, he discusses the evolutionary relationship between birds and dinosaurs. Interestingly, he digresses briefly into speculations on dinosaur feather coloration. I remember several invited lectures he gave on coloration in bird feathers; specifically (if I remember correctly) there was something about there being no such thing as actual (i.e., pigmented) blue feathers. Rather, blue coloration is due to the diffraction of the light through clear feathers--pretty neat.

Anyway, here's the episode.

PS--That reminds me: I recently saw an article of his in Science on parental behavior in dinosaurs.

Parrots, the Universe, and Everything

Here's a talk Douglas Adams gave at UC Santa Barbara in 2001--he's hilarious as always. It focuses mostly on his excellent environmentalist book, Last Chance to See. (The Geeks questioning him at the end are nearly unbearable, though--they're almost charicatures out of an SNL skit.)



Wish I could trade a few dozen Jenny McCarthies and Ben Steins to have Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Stephen Jay Gould, and Douglas Adams still alive today.

Jared Diamond on the origin of religion

Here's an excellent lecture by the always fascinating Jared Diamond, where he discusses the evolutionary factors that probably lead to the establishment of religions in human societies:

Christopher Hitchens beating the intellectual shit out of lots of blithering idiots

Christopher Hitchens: Man I love that guy. CH: knows history. Vs. other guy: makes up words about history he wishes were true.



Next, same deal, but five times worse. It's amazing that there are no arguments that are less than 300 years old, which have all been thoroughly refuted. My favorite is the gentleman who actually says science is good for intelligent people, but what about unintelligent people?

For his next trick, CH'll beat up a pack of kindergartners. (Don't these people read even one book before trying to debate this guy?

Bonus: Here he is shredding some nimrod on the radio.

Philosophiæ Doctor

I'm back, baby! And it's Doctor FardelsBorne now!

That was a miserable couple of months, but I turned in a 443 page dissertation to the University last week, jumped through all the hoops, paid obeisance to the bureaucracy, appeased the witch-doctors, achieved escape velocity, and I'm out!

Attenborough

Sir. David Attenborough is teh awesome.