Blue Collar Scientist

I guess I’ve arrived as a legitimate blogger if I’m getting a link from PZ. Check it out.

I’m actually not sure whether the blog will survive or not. Currently the Expelled reviews post is getting hit by StumbleUpon, Digg, and now Pharyngula readers. Traffic today - Sunday, when I normally take a blog day off - has already been 48 standard deviations above the mean.

Oh well. I’m running the SuperCache, and we’ll just see what happens. If my cheap-o hosts pull the plug, I’ll spend a few hours moving to MediaTemple and updating DNS servers, and then I’ll be back online.

The comment of the week looked like it was going to be hard to pick. There were a number of contenders, as there has been a lot of commenting here over the last week, particularly on the Expelled posts. But just as I was going through the comments this week to choose the best, one was left that I immediately recognized was the clear winner. It was left on my post John Freshwater Mutilates Students? and comes from a purported former student of Freshwater. I think it bears repeating in its entirety:

Believe it or not, I actually had Mr. Freshwater for 8th grade science, and I just happened to be traveling back to Mt. Vernon for a funeral when I heard this on the news. It didn’t surprise me too much, to tell you the truth. He’s a likeable guy, but he’s always gone too far with religion in the classroom. I’m an atheist, through and through, and I have been since well before I was in his class. I honestly don’t remember any particular incidents that were too far out of the norm for a small town in the Midwest (not that I think that they were right, or even legal, necessarily, but he didn’t come into the class and carve stigmata into his hands or anything.)

The ‘electrostatic device’ was apparently either a tesla coil or van de graaf generator. I’m a physics teacher now, and I don’t know how he managed to burn a cross onto someone, particularly against their will. Those instruments take some time to do any real damage, maybe 15-20 seconds to make a small burn (perhaps a minute for a small cross) with a tesla coil and dozens of long arcs in a carefully planned way to produce a patterned burn with a van de graaf. It would take half an hour or more all told, even if you planned ahead and all participants were willing. Additionally, anything that leaves a burn from either produces a small scar that lasts a while (I really like playing with electrostatic devices and I’ve burned myself from time to time.)

To make myself clear, I don’t support the guy. This type of thing (religion being forced on kids in the classroom) goes on all too often in small town America and those who complain get squashed by the higherups. However, keeping a Bible on your desk is NOT against the law, nor is it particularly onerous behavior, in my opinion. Having religious beliefs is the right of every person in the US, including teachers and students. What is not legal is when the government (via teachers in this case) uses that power to force religion on the public (students here.) If he was doing a daily Bible reading, that’s one thing, but if it was just there as his personal possession and not as a classroom tool, then it’s nobody’s business but his. Separation of church and state does not mean that religion is illegal in any arena that government is involved in, what it does mean is that the government can’t use its power to coerce us. If he DID manage to burn a cross into a kid’s arm intentionally, he should be resting his heels in a jail cell, plain and simple, and like the previous commenter, I’d go berserk if this were my daughter.

The Link of the Week for this week was easy to choose. It comes from Gwangi Valley - Lost Blog of the Gwangi, and it isn’t so much because of the link to my Expelled reviews post, which was pretty straightforward:

In the meantime I want to point you to a glorious blog post at Blue Collar Scientist which covers critics’ reactions to the… do I have to call it a documentary? OK, fine, the ‘documentary’.

Instead, it is because that blog is really good, and I hadn’t seen it before. From their about page:

Do you believe the Loch Ness monster is real, that there may be a hidden valley full of living dinosaurs somewhere, that pads on your feet will draw out ‘toxins’ or that crystals will heal you? Well, if you do, no matter if you’re a Raelian or a thalian or a Baptist… you’re kind of an idiot.

Yes. Yes indeed. But this link is also recognized because of the way the blog author strode into the mass of credulous creationist comments to my post and started swinging a truncheon of righteousness and truth.

So congratulations Jason P., and Ella Rache, for winning the Comment and Link of the Week awards, respectively. This entirely value-free award entitles you to absolutely nothing but our good opinion. (Maybe someday we’ll put together a badge.)

My posting on Some Expelled Reviews has been updated with another seven reviews, bringing the total to nineteen. Just thought I’d mention it if you have some perverse need to read even more about this morally bankrupt and abhorrent movie.

On the good side, though, the post has been getting a gargantuan amount of traffic. At any given moment, I’m number four to six on the front page of Google on a search for “Expelled reviews,” trading places periodically with the NCSE’s Expelled Exposed site, which I’ve been linking to every chance I get for a month. That makes me inordinately proud, but wasn’t really my intention when I posted - I posted the article as an index that other bloggers could use to quickly and easily find reviews on opening day, and I did it because I was up, developing software for an astronomical observatory, as midnight swept across North America and the reviews were released.

But Bay of Fundie noticed the post right away and linked to it, and then Skepchick included it in their daily Quickies, and after that so did a bunch of others. Then it hit StumbleUpon, and that’s when things started to go really well for that post.

Or really badly, depending on your perspective. Currently, the site is running really slowly, even though I’m caching the post and supposedly doing everything right. I’m wondering when my cheap and incompetent hosts will pull the plug (if that happens, we have a plan, so no worries - we’ll be back). I never expected this blog to get the kind of traffic it has been getting - I thought I’d develop a few hundred loyal readers and labor on in anonymity. But I’m not complaining!

Welcome to our first annual roughly once-weekly recognition of the best comment on the blog for the past week, and the best incoming link from other blogs. Winners receive our kind thoughts and high regards. We reserve the right to award these valuable prizes multiple times per week, or to suspend the awards as we see fit.

The award for best comment of the week goes to Spiv, for his excellent comment on Of Ducks and Souls. As you will recall, the posting dealt with a news story about some people who believed that personality traits, and maybe pieces of the soul, were transferred during organ transplants, and that this accounted for a number of statistically probable certain coincidences. In the middle of a thoughtful and well-presented comment, Spiv let fly with this text which had BCS and Iatra laughing various parts of their anatomy off for several minutes:

The more I read, the more I was expecting to see a story mixed in there about how someone with a baboon heart suddenly started loving bananas.

Congratulations, Spiv, for being the first person ever to receive our entirely value-free award for best comment of the week.

The race for best incoming link was very close, so we’ve decided to award a tie. The Greenbelt wins for a droll comment that appeals to our dry sense of humor:

Recommended are a look at the new Indiana Jones movie (”Instead of fighting Nazis, Indy will spend a good portion of the movie working to accumulate sufficient grants for his field excavations.”) at Archaeoporn and Blue Collar Scientist’s look at a new book claiming that Sumerians observed an asteroid impact on Earth (hint: he doubts it very much).

Well, the “he doubts it very much” broke us up in part because almost the same phrase had been used in the recent meeting of Science and Skepticism in Anchorage earlier that day. But it is also true that I’ve been picking at the issue like an itchy scab. It’s just that it is all so… so… what’s the word I’m looking for? Silly, I guess.

However, Blake Stacey does at least as well for getting (and finding funny) a joke that nobody else remarked upon.

So congratulations, everyone, for winning, and thanks for helping ring in this new, narcissistic, and value free blog tradition-to-be of recognizing those who link back and comment in a witty or erudite way.

Yesterday’s science fair judging was a great success and huge fun, and today I’m paying the price. I simply must get some other things done to catch up for the full day I took off to volunteer in the local schools.

Consequently, there will be no provocative rants on yet another measles outbreak, this one in Milwaukee (and not the result of antivaccination nonsense - but remember, this is still a good illustration of the antivaccinationists’ vision for America and the world); or any discussion of Mike’s great post about yet more uses of evolutionary theory in medicine, which will surely be useful for good old-fashioned PR; and I’ll say nothing about how Fox News panned Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed in a review that apparently came out late yesterday.

I will also have nothing to say about the Expelled informercial that was apparently recorded by my TIVO and is sitting in the Now Playing list as wee speak, unwatched, due to lack of, what is it called… oh yeah: time.

Instead, you will have to sit around wondering when the BCS is going to get off his backside and post something interesting to the blog. But do please stay tuned - I promise some video of the BCS in action soon, and of course Iatra Polygenos will be posting her second column tomorrow (I think).

Quick edit to add: Striking rather close to home, someone with an active measles infection apparently went walking around SeaTac airport while connecting for a flight two weeks ago. SeaTac is the main hub and connection point for flights out of Anchorage.

There won’t be any blogging today, I don’t think, because in a couple hours I get in the car to drive about an hour to an elementary school where I’m to be a science fair judge. This particular science fair is only one school, but they have such a high participation rate that I’ll be occupied with judging for about six hours - 9 to 3 - and driving to and from for another two, making for a full day’s work, about as much as judging at the Alaska state science fair (which features more judging, and less driving).

Since we’re having a day of downtime here, let me direct you instead to Respectful Insolence, where there is good discussion of yet another study that shows Accupuncture is a placebo.

And for those of you who are astronomers like me, and have a little time on your hands, you might want to head over to this report about CO₂ maps. After you’ve absorbed the topic and the graphics, head over to the world light pollution map, and let me know whether the two maps don’t look highly correlated to you. This is in no way a surprise, since both CO₂ emission and light pollution are anthropogenic - or are the climate change denialists going to suggest that light pollution just streams out of the ground from some obscure but perfectly natural piezoelectric effect or something?

Anyway, I’ll be back to blog tomorrow, delivering the usual dose of news, snark, and analysis. Have a good one.

Commenting here is now fixed and working normally.

Things got messed up a few days ago when a SQL update went bad, scrambling our comments table and leaving the commenting system unstable. Since then, commenting has been on moderation (because for a while each attempt to leave one comment would also leave several duplicates), but now that things are working normally, we’re back to our usual open comments policy. I’m not sure at the moment whether about a day’s worth of lost comments will be restored or not, but at least we’re back to normal from here on out.

When I started this blog three months ago, it was my hope to bring aboard a small group of authors to contribute here. I hoped that the perspective these authors would provide would be a spectrum from professional to blue-collar. And I wanted the blog to emphasize issues surrounding the communication of science and skepticism.

This goal edges closer to achievement today with the addition of a second contributor to the blog. I’m pleased to welcome Iatra Polygenos to our bylines. Iatra is a veterinarian here in Anchorage, and she’s planning to write about once a week. In about five minutes she’s going to make her first post here, so please make her feel welcome!

Last week, the Blue Collar Scientist servers were screaming for mercy, sagging under the weight of an enormous amount of traffic sent my way by StumbleUpon. The post of interest - the one that shot to the top of the “most popular” sidebar and will likely stay there for quite some time - is about the blasphemous remarks that Casey Luskin didn’t write on his website.

Here’s last week’s traffic spike:

You can see two spikes in my usual ebb and flow of traffic there. The small one, on the left, was about two hours of intense traffic to a post in which I considered the question of whether intelligent design creationism was pro-infanticide. It just so happens that it was ClickMonkey that added that post to StumbleUpon.

And now he’s struck again. The great big spike on the right is his doing as well. Apparently not being satisfied with the previous display of his influence, he added the Casey Luskin post, and all of a sudden the server got whaled on for about forty-five minutes - and then less intensely for about a day thereafter. A bunch of other people thumbs-up’ed the post - thanks, everyone! - and that appears to have driven the total traffic to quite high levels.

So, Clickmonkey: Thank you for reading my blog. Thanks for being directly responsible for about 30% of the total traffic the blog has ever received in its entire history. If I ever get to meet you in person, I’ll gladly buy you a beer (or other refreshing beverage of your choice). Thanks also to the others who gave the posting a thumbs up. I sincerely appreciate your interest, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to test my hosting plan’s robustness - which apparently isn’t too terrible.

Now - its off to the laboratory with me, to write more ClickMonkey bait….

I’m pleased to announce the first (of hopefully many) Anchorage meetup for:

• the Anchorage Skeptics
• Pharyngula Fans
• Bad Astronomy Buddies
• Skepchick readers
• And anyone else interested in science and skeptical thinking.

We will meet on Thursday, March 20, at 7:00 PM, in the cafe at Barnes and Noble on Northern Lights Blvd. in Anchorage. The cafe serves the usual gamut of coffee and tea (in both high-test and decaf versions), juices, soft drinks, muffins, pastries, and so on.

You can get a map if this one won’t do and you don’t already know where it is.

Among those who are planning to attend: Zach of the When Pigs Fly Returns blog, Scott of Coherent Lighthouse, at least a couple people from the Alaska Science Teachers Association, two regulars from the Pharyngula comments threads, two people who have actually met the Bad Astronomer, a local veterinarian who practices evidence-based medicine, and of course, yours truly, the BCS.

If you don’t know any of us, that’s fine - come anyway! Look for the group that has a white Apple MacBook with a sticker on it that says JREF:

The agenda for the meeting is to hang out, shoot the breeze, and plan the next such get-together. I will be sharing some material relating to an upcoming Mythbusters show, I’d like to have Zach explain how pterosaur arms work, and hopefully we can convince Scott and Zach to bring some dinosaur art to show.