BPSDB.org

New site: http://www.layscience.net/bpsdb

New Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BPSDB

Bloggers:

Most existing members have been transferred to the new feed, and many of you will receive an e-mail shortly, but please do check and e-mail me with any questions. If you don’t get an e-mail from me in the next 24 hours, please e-mail me at editor@layscience.net to have your feed sorted out.

Bloggers who aren’t members, please feel free to contact me too.

Explanation:

As I mentioned in the last post, Mister DNA has been missing from the internet for many months, and is unreachable. Why, we don’t know, and I hope he’s okay. In the meantime, the brilliant project he started is falling apart - the aggregator is broken and the comment spammers are moving in. The best thing I can do is to pick this site up, and look after it until perhaps he returns to reclaim it some day.

Thanks,

Martin.

http://www.layscience.net

To All BPSDB bloggers.

Mister DNA, the owner of BPSDB, has been missing from the blogosphere for four months now, and isn’t responding to my (or as far as I can tell anyone else’s) e-mails or comments. Hopefully, he’s okay, but in the meantime, the BPSDB project is dying. The aggregator isn’t collecting most posts, and I’m having to log in to the site and clean up what I can manually, with no access to any of the underlying stuff to fix it.

I have the technology on my site, The Lay Scientist, to be able to host the project on a page there, and to have an aggregator up and running there basically overnight. Given that Mister DNA is absent and unreachable, I propose that we relocate there for the time being.

I know that it sounds like a bit of a land grab, but the facts are that the current BPSDB site is broken, Mister DNA is missing, and unless somebody does something, this worthwhile project will disappear sooner rather than later. If Mister DNA arrives back on the scene, then of course I’ll hand the reigns back over, and he can run things back on his site, as before.

So what do you think guys? How this would work is that I’d need your RSS feeds, and then to have your BPSDB posts aggregated you would simply need to write “BPSDB” somewhere in the text. I’d leave a final post on BPSDB explaining things, and then the move would be complete basically overnight.

Mr. DNA, please if you are there, let us know. If anyone else knows where he is, ditto.

Whether you agree or disagree, please leave a comment.
Martin
www.layscience.net

Ben Stein’s use of Lennon’s “Imagine” in the creationist (no-)think-piece, Expelled, pushed the limits of copyright law. Maybe it’s time to push back. Now that the DVD is up for pre-order - kudos to “The Lay Scientist” for a lovely agglomeration of reviews - let’s ask ourselves, faced with a positively dangerous, offensive, and categorically wrong piece of film, what would Thoreau do? Pirate it. I submit that Thoreau might fire up his uTorrent and, if anybody out there on the internets ever w

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Or, “Fundamentalist Christian Bloggers Read Too Much Dan Simmons.” According to Jason of “The Real Jesusland,” a protein in the human body, bearing a shape reminiscent of the cruciform, proves that the Christian God is the one true God, and that He “intelligently designed” the human body to bear witness to Him with its… molecules. Wow. This is the face of fundamentalist science: coincidence become canon, poetry become proof. While I can’t deny the saccharine quality of the symbolism Jason pu

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I want to take you on a journey through time and space. Specifically, I want to take you along the long and convoluted trail of citations that leads from David Bellamy’s surprising 2005 assertion, in a letter to New Scientist, that the vast majority of glaciers under observation were in fact increasing in size; and the 1988 paper from which this “fact” was ultimately taken. It’s a fascinating story, that I think acts as a kind of exemplar for everything that can go wrong in using sources on the internet (HT: Deltoid).

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They make pills for that now, you know Posted at 02:20 by J. A. Baker in Religious Thuggery, War on Science, Things That Make You LOL, BPSDB DaveScot “My IQ is 150” Springer seems to be suffering from irony deficiency over at Dembski’s Crib: Science has left the building once the Nazi card gets played. As far as science is concerned it doesn’t matter if Hitler and Darwin were the same person. The only thing that matters is whether his theories can stand up to scientific scrutiny.

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So, while I was trawling Technorati after my last post, to see if anyone else was talking about Harry Potter and Witchcraft, I came across this video. Yes, it’s genuine. “The film posted below shows that Harry Potter is not simply a fun fantasy diversion for our children, but rather that Harry Potter portrays witchcraft and the occult with stunning accuracy, and it is aggressively recruiting our children into the world of darkness.” If I was Orac, I’d make some witty remark about “Teh Stupid”, but I’m not, so I’ll just go and cry on behalf of mankind.

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P.Z. Myers, Leader of the Pharyngulistas and slayer of Jesus, recently posted a link to an explosive story from that serious circadian purveyor of current affairs, “Spirit Daily”, “Heresy in the Hood II: Witchcraft among Children and Teens in America” by Linda Harvey. I thought I’d repost a condensed version of that article here, with commentary.

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Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers had a lengthy, informal chat during the 2008 American Atheists conference in Minneapolis, and a recording of their conversation is now available on DVD and in the video tubes. They discuss the fight against pseudoscience as well as several interesting topics in good science.

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Indeed. Andy Schlafly’s first experimental foray into the field of science (reported here), an attempt to discredit a real scientist (Lenski) on his own turf, has ended poorly, mainly in debunking and ridicule. As a recap, this Lenski fellow published an article which firmly gave the lie to creationism, and Andy won’t have that: by Schlafly’s conclusion-based reasoning, Lenski must be wrong, and is in dire need of correcting. Having built himself a lovely windmill, Andy’s proceeded to tilt

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