Friday, October 23, 2009

Books alfresco

I was looking at my ever-growing Woolamaloo Flickr site today and was a bit puzzled as to why a fairly simple B&W photo of some books in the garden which I posted months ago had suddenly had 60 odd viewings in one day:



Books alfresco




Don't get me wrong, its an okay pic but not one of the best ones on there and its been up for months, so why the sudden flurry of interest in it? Turns out that the Book Bench blog of the New Yorker had spotted it, liked it and re-posted it. How very cool to get a mention by fellow book folks involved with such a cool journal! In case you are wondering, the book on the table is Guy Delisle's excellent piece of travel literature in comics form, the Burma Chronicles (published Drawn & Quarterly in North America, Jonathan Cape in the UK) and on the chair is Kurt Vonnegut's fascinating take on human evolution, Galapagos, which I was reading for my Book Group that month. One of the nice things about posting so many pics on Flickr is you can never tell when someone will come along, see them and enjoy one in particular. Which is part of the reason I do it and part of why I've always liked the web for so many years. (click the pic for the larger version on Flickr)

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Monday, December 10, 2007

Creationist whackos get science teacher fired

Yup, once more the intellectually feeble throwbacks who constantly espouse 'intelligent design' (which is basically the utterly discredited Creationism dressed up in laughably bad science clothes) have made a move to decrease the IQ of the world a bit more: they used a flimsy excuse to get a science education officer in Texas fired. Christine Castillo Comer's crime? She forwarded an email as an FYI which she had received from one science educational professional to some interested groups about a talk by an author in the area, an author who has looked into the fake 'science' these Intelligent Design wankers keep trying to sneak into school curriculums while also trying to have evolutionary teaching curtailed (no, they haven't realised the 19th century is over).

Her boss's boss dropped her in it claiming simply forwarding this message was tantamount to the education board endorsing it, which is ridiculous since she didn't express an opinion, simply passed on details of a scientific talk to science professionals. Besides which anyone who works for a government department or large corporation knows full well their emails are usually issued under a 'the ideas expressed in this email do not necessarily promote the ideals of the blankety blank department'. Interestingly enough this boss is a political appointee - a Bush-loving one. And the head of the board openly endorses Creationist nonsense and talks yet hangs out one of his science professionals for simply passing on details of a talk involving scientific matters to other scientific professionals.

Sadly this sort of attack on actually using our brains to logically interpret massive amounts of careful scientific date amassed over many decades by many people from paleontologists to genetic researchers is not confined to a few religious crackpots in Jesusland (as Richard Morgan terms the Texas area in his recent novel Black Man) since there have been attempts to push this nonsense in schools in the UK too. This really does infuriate me - NPR has a radio interview with Christine on their site and the whole thing stinks of a political-religious set-up for these right wing fundamentalist eejits to shove someone out the way so they can then install a new person who will agree with their retarded ideology. And if you are a Creationist don't bother explaining to me why your view point is valid, because it just isn't. You're entitled to hold your view but please feck off and don't inflict it on others much less try to infect schoolkids with your idiocy. If you believe this crap you are an anti-intellectual moron brain-washed by fundamentalists who like using their religion as a way to gain more control over people and what they can say or think - and that's the nub of it, these idiots don't just believe this fairy tale nonsense themselves, they demand it be taught to the rest of us. Thankfully the few attempts here have been laughed at in much the same way as trying to each that the Earth is flat would be, but these idiots keep trying... (link via Boing Boing)

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