The longest "Couch Gag" intro to date.

"During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood."

This article expands on what he was actually teaching:

"Actually, I did not teach creationism," Helphinstine said. "That's one thing I did not teach. I understand that's not my job. As far as what I taught. I taught ... natural selection, the effects of natural selection, genetic drifts and allele frequency that's what I taught."

That's not how some parents of students in the class see it. One parent, John Rahm, said his daughter reported that only "one day of 10" was devoted to the study of evolution, with the rest devoted to devoted to "Intelligent Design" materials. "The test as well was 90-plus percent ID material," Rahm said.

...

According to Rahm the material was "conspicuously intelligent design type information or teaching. Actually if you took the material and Googled the crucial passages it takes you to a creationist Web site called Answers in Genesis, www.answersingenesis.org, that is run by Ken Ham. ... One of the lines in his (Ham's) mission statement for the Web site is any statement which contradicts the Bible is inherently false," Rahm said.

The Sisters, OR School Board decided he'd invoked the real-life version of Godwin's law, and fired him on Monday night for "deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution."

Omniglot: A guide to the languages, alphabets, syllabaries and other writing systems of the world

Download any YouTube Video

13 places to watch tv for free online.

Scrum is the "application of common-sense to work that uses productivity producing techniques applied to software engineering." (from made_of_paradox)

Salon.com: Oprah's Ugly Secret

Fly Silent, Fly Cheap. A team of MIT engineers has conceptualized a quieter, more fuel-efficient airplane.

NYTimes Magazine: Darwin's God

IHT: Missing: Asian-American Pop Stars

Job Seekers Go High Tech with Video Resumes

The Picard Song. (Youtube Video) It's been making the rounds

The very cool Cocktail Party Physics blog is run by Jennifer Ouellette, author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics.

So much for the "liberal" Washington Post.

The Mortgage Lender Implode-o-Meter. Looks like subprime lenders are in serious trouble.

John Cleese: Laughing Yoga (YouTube Video via sandandsilk)

A Toy Instructions Wiki.

How to prolong the life of your iPod battery

iCleaner, for your iPod

Bios on over 700 Marvel Characters. The rest of the site isn't completed yet.

What to do when Your Vehicle Check Engine Light Turns On and the Warranty has Expired

Time Out New York ranks the Best Blocks in New York

From lafinjack: Real Live Preacher's Communion Taste Test. It's a video, and I haven't watched it yet.

Cory Lidle's doomed plane didn't just crash into anybody's apartment. It exploded into the empty bedroom of Kathleen Caronna, the Manhattan woman who was critically injured when a balloon knocked part of a lamppost onto her head during the 1997 Thanksgiving Day Parade.

The House on Autopilot

New York Magazine's Cover Story: "Stephen Colbert has America by the Ballots" (from rosmar)

The Empire State Strikes Back

Miscellaneous
LJ: The Customize Screen has been overhauled and more layouts are now available to paid and plus users. Also, the Navigation Strip can now be customized by color.

Details on Apple’s battery recall.

Author David Brin predicted this would happen one day: Dallas man foils a robbery 4,589 miles away in Liverpool England, while watching a webcam over the ‘net. Brin foresaw this in his 1999 book, The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?

City Mitts. Interview with the creator: The Subway Glove (Via fleurdelista)

Crummy Church Signs

LA Weekly: Welcome to Gentrification City


Politics
Bush spends 90 minutes with 5 families of slain soldiers.

kiji_kat on the Left Behind series and Christianity

On Sept. 11, CNN will replay its coverage from 2001 in real time, online. In addition, their pipeline service will be free for 24 hours.

Pope Benedict XVI has sacked his chief astronomer after a series of public clashes over the theory of evolution. The Pope believes in ID. Guess he didn’t get the memo.

A 30-person Baptist church in Mississippi banned black members and a biracial twelve-year old boy because he might encourage African Americans to join.

Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School in NOLA were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.

Welcome to the new Solar system, now with one less planet.: “Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight. After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status.”

Something for rparvaaz: That restaurant we’ve been discussing is changing its name.

The FDA approved Plan B by Barr Pharmaceuticals this morning. Full CDER info. Plan B is an emergency contraceptive that, taken within 72 hours after contraceptive failure or unprotected sex, can reduce the risk of pregnancy up to 89%. It is not an abortifacent and does not work on those who are already pregnant. Women may buy it without a prescription, but only with proof they’re 18 or older. Girls 17 and younger still will need a doctor’s note to buy the pills. This compromise is the culmination of a nasty three-year political battle.

Someone has it in for the SciFi Channel. :)

Wisconsin’s Beloit College has published its sixth annual Mindset List.

Does anyone even watch the show anymore? Survivor plays the race card: “So yesterday, on CBS’s morning infotainment program, the network announced that for “Survivor: Cook Islands,” which debuts next month, 20 contestants would be divided into the White Tribe, the African American Tribe, the Asian American Tribe and the Hispanic Tribe. We’ll pause here to give you time to re-hinge your jaw.” More here. Just for laughs,

Just because I love the name: The Velveteen Rabbi Syndicated feed: velveteenrabbi.

10 Tips for Keeping Your Desk Clean and Tidy

The digital toilet


Politics
Back to the Ouija Board: Nuclear Apocalypse milder than expected. A leading Islamic scholar predicted armagaeddon would happen on Tuesday.

Don’t worry. WWIII may yet happen: Israel says “We may have to go it alone against Iran”.
Israel is also using the Lebanon war as justification to put the agreed-upon pullout plan on hold temporarily. In doing so they’re also snubbing President Bush, their staunchest ally. The plan is about a year old. More here. Don’t count on this being the case for too long, though: “Israel’s costly and inconclusive war in Lebanon has triggered a round of internal recriminations so bitter that some observers question whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government can survive.”

The WashPost has had solid coverage of this latest MidEast crisis.

Independent Weekly: Do You Know What It Means to Myth New Orleans? “One of the Crescent City’s biggest challenges is overcoming inaccurate reports and stereotypes that formed in the immediate wake of Katrina”

Choices that come back to haunt you....: “In the heart of Tehran sits one of Iran’s most important nuclear facilities, a dome-shaped building where scientists have conducted secret experiments that could help the country build atomic bombs. It was provided to the Iranians by the United States.”

Vanity Fair: Rare scenes from 9/11

Evolutionary biology has vanished from the list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal (US) education grant for low-income college students. The government says “Oops,” (yeah, right) and promises to restore it.

Science and Technology
windswept: How to kill RFID tags with a cell phone.

When pills fail, electrical implants can mend brains damaged by Parkinson’s, stroke, and depression.

The Richard Dawkins Multimedia Archive. Dawkins, author of many books on Evolution, including The Blind Watchmaker, is an outspoken scientist and atheist.

14+ Money Saving Computer User Ideas

A slim cable for a space elevator has been built stretching a mile into the sky, enabling robots to scrabble some way up and down the line. LiftPort Group, a private US company on a quest to build a space elevator by April 2018, stretched the strong carbon ribbon 1 mile into the sky from the Arizona desert outside Phoenix in January tests.

Microsoft has released a new, free version of Windows Defender.


Miscellany
bigboobedcanuck: Olympic Figure Skating for Dummies

wordweaverlynn points out that photography from the 1906 SF earthquake is on exhibit at the SF MOMA.

The DFL blog celebrates last-place finishers at the Olympics.

This year’s hair trends from the runways.

The FDA has reopened a probe into possible benzene contamination of soft drinks.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, tyee.com is running a “Love on the Edge” series this week: “Breast Wishes” / “Why We Love the Geeks” / “Married to the Wrong Sex”


Politics
The WashPost reported that the GOP was concerned that our VP wasn’t speaking out about shooting his hunting partner. Ari Fleischer chimed in as did Marlin Fitzwater and a variety of editorial columnists. (that last link’s from made_of_paradox.) So... Cheney issued a public statement about the incident yesterday. The WH Press Secretary is having a rough week. Note who is asking him questions: Two of the outlets mentioned in the article are Republican: the NYPost and Cox Communications.

I have a bad feeling about this: Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas joined House Democratic leaders at a town hall meeting on Tuesday to roll out an “innovation agenda” that aims to prepare the next generation of technological entrepreneurs. Note to the Dems, don’t let him write your speeches.

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of international terrorism suspects or people who allegedly aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

Could there be a secondary evolutionary process that genetically transmits instinctive and emotional information across generations? Is this the purpose of at least some of the inactive “junk DNA” that makes up over 98% of our genome? The Age interviews amateur evolutionist Danny Vendramini, whose new theory seeking to answer these questions, called The Unified Teem Theory of Evolution, or Teemosis, is challenging mainstream evolutionary thought. The article also addresses how the greater scientific community has responded to him. Vendramini has no formal training in biology -- he’s a screenwriter and sculptor, but his theories are being treated with some respect.

Mr. Vendramini has a website articulating his ideas, here:

Briefly, ‘teem theory’ argues that in multicellular animals, powerful, traumatic emotions generated by stressful environmental circumstances (like predatory attacks, sexual encounters, accidents, etc.) can be genetically encoded into an area of an organism’s DNA called noncoding DNA (ncDNA).

Once encrypted in ncDNA, these traumatic emotions can be inherited to offspring, providing them with an emotional memory of the traumatic event.

Each Trauma Encoded Emotional Memory (or ‘teem’) has the potential to transfer adaptive information (in the form of an emotional memory) from one generation to the next, thus building up a repository of emotional memories of the ancestral environment. These emotions form the basis of all instincts and innate behaviour in multicellular animals.

I doubt it’ll gain many supporters in scientific circles, but it’s nice to see someone suggesting radical evolutionary theories without a religious component.

Under pressure from an impending Supreme Court case -- more than four years after 9/11 and three and a half years after his arrest, -- Jose Padilla, American citizen, (BBC profile,) has been charged with crimes by the Federal government. It’s not the ‘dirty bomb’ plot he was arrested for, either. Instead, “the Justice Department’s 31-page indictment charges Padilla with conspiracy to murder, kidnap and harm people overseas and with supporting terrorists.“ Evidence strongly suggests the Bush administration would have preferred to hold him without a trial, evidence or proof for the rest of his life, but were likely concerned that a ruling in the upcoming Supreme Court case could redefine the parameters of what constitutes a Constitutional or human rights violation.

Why is this case so important? Our government arrested and detained an American citizen without criminal charges and denied him access to lawyers until the Supreme Court ruled on his case. These are rights granted every American citizen by our Constitution. His indictment offers no evidence that he ever engaged in terrorist activity and no evidence of a dirty bomb plot or any other plot to engage in terrorism in America, the charges for which he was originally arrested. (More here, from the CATO institute.)

---

Jon Stewart hit back at Bill O’Reilly last night, for using a year-old Daily Show clip to promote his war against the war against Christmas. A high-quality download of last night’s clip is available for download here :-)

Victory is Life! It Takes a Potemkin Village and the Bush victory plan that wasn’t.

An interview with Richard Dawkins. (from goddes and others)

Editorial: Pat Robertson is funding the legal battle for three pharmacists who are fighting to refuse to provide a prescribed “morning-after” pill to patients or refer them to a pharmacy that will fill the prescription.

” If it feels wrong for you to sell something from a counter - whether it’s a morning after pill or “The National Review” - it’s admirable when people want to be flexible. But when you want to make it impossible for someone to buy those things from anyone, it’s not a matter of conscience but of control.”

---

The propaganda war: “Beware the Caliphate” (IHT editorial)

The meaning of (the war over) Christmas

Doonesbury: “Skippy McScapegoat and 9/11”

rfmcdpei: How to build a history

255 old comments in Gmail this morning, but of course, none from the last 3 days. So if you find me responding to something you posted during the Bronze Age but not this morning, that’s why.

Miscellany
Flash Games: RSVP and Sober Santa (Santa is via cmpriest)

Mediasite.com links to expert presentations on a variety of topics.

An Extensive Google Services Guide and The Ultimate Guide to Yahoo! Services

Coke is launching a Coke/Coffee hybrid called Coke Blak. We’re all going to be so over-caffeinated we’ll vibrate on our own frequencies.

Excellent advice if you’re planning on pursuing an advanced degree. “I did a PhD and did NOT go mad” (via linkfrenzy)

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has a blog. (credit to gbam and others.) Edit: 6_bleen_7 notes that Adams has used it to "disseminate some huge misconceptions about evolution and science in general"


Science
A preview of Chris Combs’ photo exhibition of autistic children: Inside the Spectrum. Description here.

Cory Doctorow on Microcontrollers in the NYTimes.

Make your own lightbulb (also via linkfrenzy)

Interview with Don Wise on Incompetent Design theory.

Oceanic microbes may be the key to our planet’s future.


Politics
And it only took them 60 years: The Red Cross has designed a neutral (free of political, religious or any other connotation) symbol, a “Red Crystal,” which will allow Israel to join the international humanitarian movement.

Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has suggested moving Israel to Europe and also denies the Holocaust happened. In October, he called for Israel to be wiped off the map. (Note that if an Israeli leader made similar statements, the entire world would turn against them, issue sanctions, etc.) Newsweek profiles Ahmadinejad in next week’s issue. He’s obviously a very different leader than former President Mohammed Khatami, who was a moderate reformer.

An interview with Elie Wiesel

liadnan points out here that the UK has ruled that evidence procured by torture is inadmissable in their courts.

Dick “Velcro VP” Cheney’s approval ratings have reached Grinchian levels. Unfortunately, it looks like the poll data the article links to is nearly a month old.

More White House Accountability Problems? Congress has requested all correspondence regarding Katrina from the White House. The White House refused, saying sifting through 71 million email messages was impractical. Congress curtailed the request to specific people’s records and correspondence. The White House refused again, citing separation of power issues. A subpoena to force them to comply will no doubt be issued next week.

The Propaganda President: The U.S. military has appointed someone to investigate a controversial propaganda program that paid Iraqi media outlets to run favorable stories written by American troops. LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, NY Observer, Slate and Slate.

Shades of science fiction: Israelis to be allowed euthanasia by machine.

Ann Coulter’s scheduled speech is disrupted by hecklers at UConn.