Something for that Special Evangelical in Your Life

What with the holidays coming around (which were heralded by Christmas ads on November first...), I bet you're looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-please Fundamentalist Christian on your list. Well, look no further, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden has found for us some Vaccine Waivers for Creationists - just print the pdf on an appropriate page of stickers and you have an instant gift as well as a means to pitch in and conserve the seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccines for those who need them!

Just a Thought...

Were Intelligent Design ever to gain acceptance as science, those craptastic Left Behind novels would then be Sci-Fi.

Ewwwwwww.

Happy Darwin Day

Today is the 199th anniversary of Darwin's birth.

I wonder if the scientific community would mark the occasion with as much fanfare if the Creationists weren't constantly trying to demonize the man and his work.

Kudos to Moon-grrl for pointing out this holiday.

Evolution Education for Everyone

Lauded in both Science and Nature, the National Academy of Sciences recently released the third edition of its booklet aimed at educating the public on Evolution, entitled "Science, Evolution, and Creationism." You can buy it, or you can read it free online. It's twice as long as the last edition, published in 1999, and those extra pages are spent using recent research to illustrate the concepts involved, among other things.

UPDATE: I somehow managed to miss the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' own glowing review of the booklet. That article also has a link to the results of the Coalition of Scientific Societies' Evolution in Science Education Survey, as well as some reports, presentations, and the like that came from the survey. I've not yet had time to look at those (I don't blog while working and I'm set to leave town for the weekend) but when I get around to it I may write up a review of them if I'm impressed.

Something I've Been Up To Recently

Back in early November, one of the News-Gazette's infrequently-posting bloggers, Rhonda Robinson, regurgitated a bunch of Discovery Institute talking points about the Ben Stein-narrated documentary, Expelled. A few commenters, including myself and Narci of Narciblog, take Rhonda and some other commenters to task. The thread's been silent for a couple weeks, though, so either she's decided not to follow/further the discussion on the topic, or has moved on to other things.

PS - What's the point of having a blog if you update it once every few months at best?