A journalist who argues that science is a good thing!

Wonderful discovery in today's Observer: a journalist who argues that science is a good thing. Yes, you read that right: a journalist who argues that science is a good thing. This has made my day although I suspect she has a lonely life. Here's the article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/12/carol-sarler-sperm-stem-cells

More language ignorance

The Language Log talked about something called the SpinSpotter, which is supposed to be an application that scans text on the web and identifies grammar or spelling mistakes as well as the authors' biases. The application of course is not real and part of what gives it away in the article announcing it is that the guys were unable to identify what a passive voice is. The line in question is:

passive voice (example: a story says "bombs land" without stating which party is responsible for them)

How can you say that you want to get rid of passive voice when you don't even know the difference between passive voice and intransitive verbs?!?

(crossblogged in cynthax)

Christian school credits don't count for UC

I don't know if you guys heard of it, but here is a CNN link to the story.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2008/08/17/finnstrom.ca.no.credit.creationism.cnn
(I got it from the RD website)

Differences between boys and girls

This link here is to a Language Log post by Mark Liberman. In a nutshell: there is a guy called Leonard Sax who is a strong advocate of single sex public education, and as such, is always looking for scientific evidence that shows that boys are different from girls. Guess what: most of his "scientific" evidence is either misused or exaggerated. Mark Liberman is a linguist from UPenn who is very good at comparing media reports of a scientific finding with the original journal articles, usually showing that the media didn't get it (or are using it to put forth some agenda).
Anyway, here is the original post.

Fitna

Guys, check my blog's post on this Dutch film.

Dear Comrades,
I happened upon this website today. I haven't time to read it all, but the argument at the very bottom using complex numbers is absurd. His equation i=1/i is wrong from the start. Guess what! If you write something incorrect it leads to something incorrect. Proving what exactly?


Here's the link:

http://www.hyperflight.com/oh-teacher.htm

Cheers,
Drew

Sexpelled!