Archive for June, 2012
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Friday, June 29th, 2012
Again originating from Texas like yesterday’s story of Creationist nonsense (exported to Louisiana), but this time it’s Texas Republicans in their platform: 4) It opposes multicultural education and “critical thinking”: “We believe the current teaching of a multicultural curriculum is divisive,” the platform says, adding that it supports teaching “common American identity and loyalty instead [...]
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Friday, June 29th, 2012
I mean, they’re screwing over their children by sending them to schools that teach that “Darwinism” is wrong because of the Loch Ness Monster: One tenet has it that if it can be proved that dinosaurs walked the earth at the same time as man then Darwinism is fatally flawed. … The textbooks in the [...]
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Thursday, June 28th, 2012
In my opinion, anyway. Here’s the poem, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (and “heard” does rhyme with “Learn’d” better than “listened to”), from Leaves of Grass. WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, [...]
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Monday, June 25th, 2012
I mentioned it recently, but here’s a reminder about the details: I will be running a free two-hour workshop titled: Science Fiction + Science? Writing Facts into Fiction with Mike Brotherton. Date & Time: Tuesday, June 26th, 2013, 6:30 to 8:30PM Location: Laramie County Library, Cottonwood Room, Cheyenne, WY I don’t know what kind of [...]
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Sunday, June 24th, 2012
Radiation profiling. We are living in the future. A buddy of mine tries to explain Prometheus at io9.com. Best of luck, David, you’re going to need it! HULK has some insight, too, and it annoys him. Science — it’s a girl thing! Good idea to excite any demographic about science, but the execution is excruciatingly [...]
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Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
Intellectual integrity and fairness are really important to me. Research indicates that conservatives tend to let their biases lead them to erroneous conclusions and deny science and facts more often than liberals. I kind of expect it from certain types of conservatives and tend to get more incensed when liberals lie to make their case, [...]
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Friday, June 22nd, 2012
Encyclopedia Brown is a fictional boy detective in a series of stories by Donald J. Sobol, and one of my heroes, who uses facts and logic to solve mysteries. The stories about him always ended with him telling you the solution to the mystery, with a note to turn to the back of the book [...]
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Thursday, June 21st, 2012
io9 is sharing the good word about the 2-day version of Launch Pad I’m doing at Dragoncon with the headline: One Astronomy Workshop Where You Can Cosplay as Sailor Moon. Catchy headline, and true, and probably will hit a cross section of Dragoncon attendees interested in astronomy. I have to admit that Halloween is my [...]
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Wednesday, June 20th, 2012
Since I wrote my “Fixing Prometheus” post last week, I’ve noticed a continuing flood of online articles and videos about the science of Prometheus. Mostly pointing out how bad the science is, but a few that also launch into productive, educational directions. I thought it might be handy to compile a lot of these in [...]
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Tuesday, June 19th, 2012
There are some principled conservatives out there who can actually hold up their end of a fact-based intellectual conversation, but they’re derided as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only), liberals, and even traitors. Why? Because authoritarian conservatives, who believe that their biased beliefs trump facts and that compromising with eggheads is evil, are in ascendancy now [...]
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Sunday, June 17th, 2012
Neil DeGrasse Tyson investigates the space science of summer science fiction movies. That’s like three things I love all together in the same package! It’s not in depth, but he gets his digs in on Prometheus. And a video (INCLUDES SPOLERS) that is a perfect summary of my feelings on Prometheus (thanks Todd!): Alien [...]
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Friday, June 15th, 2012
I have an article out this month in the latest issue of the SFWA Bulletin about my astronomy workshop Launch Pad (it’s a good magazine for writers in general, SFWA members or not, and I can recommend it in general). I will reprint the article below, and suggest that anyone interested in attending might consider [...]
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