Winter’s Haven

Matt Nisbet, of Framing Science infamy, has posted a draft chapter of his book. Here’s my favorite section:
Dawkins, for example, argues as a scientist that religion is comparable to a mental virus or “meme” that can be explained through evolution, that religious believers are delusional, and that in contrast, atheists are representative of a healthy, [...]

Terrible sentence of the day:
Whatever the merits of Romer’s belief, the NYT’s line about the Depression proving that “fiscal stimulus works” is just plain horseradish.
I submit that absolutely no good, literary or culinary, can come of confusing horseradish and bullshit.
On a related note, the Bulwer-Lytton and Lyttle Lytton contests aim to collect the worst [...]

On the Wired science blog, Brandon Keim argues that Bush’s stem cell policy was neither anti-science nor crassly political, but rather followed from a legitimate ethical dispute.
Keim says that “there are plenty of examples of the Bush administration skewing scientific facts for political ends, the ban on stem cell funding wasn’t one of them.”, from [...]

Billy Graham apparently has a newspaper column in which he answers letters (hat tip to PZ). One person writes:

DEAR BILLY GRAHAM: Why do people get involved in cults? My cousin has gotten involved in one, and no matter what we say to him, he refuses to listen. He says we are the ones who are [...]

I’ve been meaning to lay out my views on this question for a long time, but now Will Wilkinson has done it for me, and probably done a better job of it than I would have.
His post is a bit long, however, so let me summarize. Some very real market failures lead to underinvestment [...]

I stumbled across a prescient article on spam, written back in 2002. Paul Graham predicted that in the future the only spam that would be able to get by filters would consist of little more than a snippet of innocuous text and a link. The spam I’ve seen over the past year or so has [...]