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Doug Saunders of The Globe and Mail has been writing dispatches from Romania. The article linked to in the title refers to the large population of black bears there. The black bear is more or less extinct in Europe—except in Romania where, according to Saunders, they’re something of a menace.
After the huge helping of negative publicity over their own hypocrisy with a side dish of “Wasn’t that a rip-off of Harvard’s video again?” the producers of Expelled seem to be running scared:
They’ve wiped the remaining scheduled screenings from their Web site while they think about damage control or copyright violations.
Ernest Shackleton was a genuine hero. We have a contemporary opinion from Sir Raymond Priestley (1886 - 1974), who was a British geologist and Antarctic explorer. Priestley actually went on Shackleton’s expedition of 1907 - 1909. A paraphrase of his judgement is printed on my favourite T-shirt:
“For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”
Follow the link to read Ernest Shackleton’s own account of his expeditions to Antarctica.
Read more about Shackleton.
It’s peculiar how often this so-called “science” film, Expelled, is being screened at churches.
I suppose that is where the producers expect to find a receptive audience. Which means that they think it’s a religious film.
Eric at The Futile Cycle had this to say:
A lot of news stories are once again talking about breakfast and its connections to weight and obesity. Consider this BBC article as one example. This Reuters article hypes breakfast as magically keeping teens skinny. The original Pediatrics journal article is here.
What’s wrong with all of this? The research doesn’t say whether eating breakfast makes someone lose weight. All it says is that skinnier teens eat breakfast more often than more obese teens, on average. That doesn’t mean that suddenly eating breakfast more will make you lose weight. [Read more]
Hooray! Richard Dawkins has posted his review of the cdesign proponentsist movie Expelled and the events of its Thursday night’s screening that he attended.
“In the course of this film, Mathis tricked a number of scientists, including PZ Myers and me, into taking prominent parts in the film, and both of us are handsomely thanked in the closing credits.
“Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Mathis instructed some uniformed goon to evict Myers while he was standing in line with his family to enter the theatre, and threaten him with arrest if he didn’t immediately leave the premises. Did it not occur to Mathis — what would occur any normally polite and reasonable person — that Myers, having played a leading role in the film, might have been welcomed as an honoured guest to watch it? Or, more cynically, did he not know that PZ is one of the country’s most popular bloggers, with a notoriously caustic wit, perfectly placed to set the whole internet roaring with delighted and mocking laughter? I long ago realised that Mathis was deceitful. I didn’t know he was a bungling incompetent.
Not just incompetent at public relations, incompetent in his chosen profession of film-making, for the film itself, as I discovered when I saw it on Friday (and this genuinely surprised me) is dull, artless, amateurish, too long, poorly constructed and utterly devoid of any style, wit or subtlety. It bears all the hallmarks of a film-maker who knows nothing about the craft of making films…. I’ll come to that in a moment.” [Read more]
