Archive for 2009

What We Killed Thursday

Erythroxylum echinodendron was endemic to Cuba and was declared extinct in the wild in 1998.  Echinodendron means “spiny tree,” and you can see where it got its name in this herbarium specimen.  Erythroxylum is a tropical genus with about 250 species. While this particular species was declared extinct in the wild rather than extinct, this […]

Times are changing

On May 28, the hosts of KRXQ’s “Rob, Arnie, and Dawn in the Morning” devoted half an hour to promoting abuse of trans children and making very cruel and untrue statements about trans children.  Now lots of big sponsors like Bank of America are pulling their advertising.

Switch to Opera?

I switched from Firefox to Opera last November, but I switched back after about a month because 1) I missed my extensions and 2) the buttons on several sites (including one of my credit card websites and a site I had to use for one of my classes) didn’t work. When I heard about the […]

Even insurance doesn’t help

Americans aren’t going bankrupt because they’re buying fancy cars and flat screen TVs.  They’re going bankrupt because of medical bills, even people who have insurance.  And it’s only getting worse – I’m just one of many people who can’t afford to take needed prescriptions.

We are our bodies

E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates.  The rational mind does not float above the irrational; it cannot free itself to engage in pure reason.  There are pure theorems in mathematics but no pure thoughts that discover them.  In the brain-in-the-vat fantasy […]

George Tiller

George Tiller was murdered a week ago in his church.  He was one of just a few doctors in the United States who provide late term abortions. Ezra Klein points out that his murder was a political act and that Congress needs to act accordingly: Tiller was murdered so that those in his line of […]