I was in Ballard yesterday afternoon, and I was walking down Ballard Avenue, which is a protected historical district with beautiful 19th century brick buildings – old hotels and shops and newspaper offices – and passed a gallery with some amazing sculptures in the windows, so I went in to look at all of them.

They’re like this:

The woman in the gallery said to me, “You know what they’re made of?” I said, “I assume paper.”

They are made of lottery tickets!

How cool is that?

The sculptor is Alex Lockwood.… Read the rest

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Guest post by Josh, Official Spokesgay. He wrote to Vermont Public Radio to cancel his donation because of NPR’s coverage of Chelsea Manning, and then -

So I waited for five days to hear back from Vermont Public Radio, and all I got was a polite, non-committal “Thank you for your support. . bye bye” form letter confirming my cancellation. This next won’t surprise you—I sent the board and executive staff an irritated letter for their shitty donor/listener engagement. I run a nonprofit myself and my board would have my head if I blew off a longtime donor who took the time to write such detail.

That got some attention. The development director emailed me today to apologize for … Read the rest

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We hear a lot about “tearing apart” this or that – skepticism, the atheist movement, the world of skeptoatheo science-loving nerdery. Sometimes the idea is that the tearing apart is mutual, and sometimes it’s that it’s only the pesky feminists (or the mythical Atheismplussers, who are always people who aren’t in fact Atheismplussers, like PZ and Rebecca and me).

Anyway – this idea of tearing apart is interesting. It seems like an odd thing for people who see themselves as involved in a movement to object to, because being involved in a movement also tears things apart. That’s the point of being in a movement. A movement about Keeping Everything Exactly the Same needn’t bother to be a movement. It … Read the rest

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So – Dave Silverman got his godless license plate after all. The New Jersey DMV backed down.

From the press release:

Cranford, NJ—As public backlash was growing, the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission reversed its decision on Wednesday, approving American Atheists President David Silverman’s application for custom license plates reading “ATHE1ST.”  American Atheists, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is a national non-profit dedicated to fighting discrimination against atheists.

On Monday, Silverman received a rejection email from the Commission concerning his application. It stated, “Reason for denial: Objectionable or Need Clarification.” When Silverman called to offer this clarification, he was told by a Commission official that his proposed plates were “offensive.”

“There was absolutely no reason that this plate

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From comments by quixote on First world phobias.

I’m a plant evolutionary biologist. The problem with the GMO debate is, as others have said, the conflation of many issues.
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1) The modification in approx. 75% of GM foods is RoundUp resistance. Both seed and RoundUp have to be bought from Monsanto, which strikes everybody who isn’t Monsanto as a conflict of interest. Result: besides chaining farmers to Monsanto, a whole mess of environmental issues, bad farming practices, etc., etc., etc. Triple-plus Ungood.
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2) The evidence is unclear on the transferability of the viral vectors used to introduce foreign genes to the target plants. The initial dogma was that lateral transfer was about as likely as being hit … Read the rest

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Mano has a great post on the strange disdain for bloggers.

I move in circles (socially and at work) where people tend to be politically interested but surprisingly ignorant of many facts. I blame it on the fact that they spend far too much time following a few big name sources of TV and print news that they think are comprehensive and giving them the full picture, but in fact are very narrow. When I discuss politics with them and point out all manner of things that they do not know, they sometimes ask me how I get information that they were unaware of. I tell them that I read a lot of blogs that monitor a wide range

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Aw, damn, those oppressive bureaucrats in China are really oppressive – now they’re six years ago they started saying monks have to get government permission before they can reincarnate! That’s just mean.

China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is “an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.”

It’s an interesting notion, “the procedures by which one is to reincarnate” – what would those be, do you suppose? And how do you know you’ve performed them, and how do you know you’ve performed them … Read the rest

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I should start a category here, called Twitter Over-reaching or Trying to Say Too Much in a Tweet or Twitter Is Not the Place for Grand Generalizations, or something. Because I keep seeing people doing that, and it can be funny or pathetic or destructive or all those.

The latest one that I’ve noticed is by Peter Boghossian. It’s not part of a larger conversation, the previous and following tweets aren’t related, so it really is meant to stand alone and say something true.

Attempts to engineer social justice will be unfair if they target equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity.

He’s a philosopher and I’m not, but that just looks silly to me. Attempts will … Read the rest

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God damn John Scalzi is good.

Yesterday: To The Dudebro Who Thinks He’s Insulting Me by Calling Me a Feminist

Just read it. I don’t want to spoil it with appetizers or remarks; just read it.

But I’ll give you a visual appetizer.

I’ve always wondered what that pleasant sweep of green at the top of his blog was, and vaguely assumed it was a nearby park. It’s his fucking front lawn. That plays a part, and gets its own meme, so read. Read read read.… Read the rest

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As you may have already seen, Avicenna was falsely accused of raping someone at TAM 2013. He’s never been to TAM; he hasn’t been in the US for several years. He is not much pleased.

Turns out Mr. [Richard] Sanderson is a possible suspect in the fake accusation that I raped/molested someone at TAM 2013. Why? Because when I admitted publically about the accusation, I also pointed out that I had an alibi. Oh if you wish to know why I admitted to it, I felt the need to be honest because I figured that if I didn’t admit to it, someone would drop it on me as a “surprise” and I would rather do it myself. Bear in

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The Annals of Irrational Fear, GMO Division. The New York Times reports:

ONE bright morning this month, 400 protesters smashed down the high fences surrounding a field in the Bicol region of the Philippines and uprooted the genetically modified rice plants growing inside.

Had the plants survived long enough to flower, they would have betrayed a distinctly yellow tint in the otherwise white part of the grain. That is because the rice is endowed with a gene from corn and another from a bacterium, making it the only variety in existence to produce beta carotene, the source of vitamin A. Its developers call it “Golden Rice.”

FrankenFoods. Playing god. It ain’t natural. Yuck.

Not owned by any company, Golden

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MSF reports neurotoxic symptoms in hospital patients in Syria, according to the BBC.

Medecins Sans Frontieres says hospitals it supports in Syria treated about 3,600 patients with “neurotoxic symptoms”, of whom 355 have died.

The medical charity said the patients had arrived in three hospitals in the Damascus area on 21 August – when opposition activists say chemical attacks were launched against rebels.

But MSF says it cannot “scientifically confirm” the use of chemical weapons.

Scientific uncertainty.

“MSF can neither scientifically confirm the cause of these symptoms nor establish who is responsible for the attack,” said MSF Director of Operations Bart Janssens.

But it added that the symptoms, as well as the “massive influx of patients in a short

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So having mentioned the Sourland mountains (and laughed at their diminutive size) I looked them up, half thinking it might be just a family name for that tiny rise on the western horizon – but no, it’s a real thing. Sourland Mountain.

Sourland Mountain is a 17 miles (27 km) long ridge in central New Jersey, extending from the Delaware River at Lambertville to the western end of Hillsborough Township near the community of Neshanic, through Montgomery Township and into Hopewell Township in Mercer County.^[1] It comprises the largest contiguous forest in Central Jersey, nearly 90 square miles (233 km²) in area. The highest point is only 568 feet (173 m) above sea

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It’s always a guy with three or four or six wives. Why not the other way around for a change? Well, in Kenya, three people have chosen that option.

Two Kenyan men have signed an agreement to “marry” the same woman.

The woman had been having affairs with both men for more than four years and apparently refused to choose between them.

The agreement sets out a rota for Sylvester Mwendwa and Elijah Kimani to stay in her house and states they will both help raise any children she bears.

It sounds very sensible.

 … Read the rest

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