I would be remiss if I did not point out that this is the best blogging under the TBND umbrella in a long while.
As if West Virginia hasn’t been in the national news enough, now they’re getting flack for using Dance Dance Revolution in the middle schools gym classes.
Thursday morning, Bill Littlefield had a commentary on Boston’s public radio station WBUR criticizing the policy. He compared using video games in fitness to using junk food to get children to eat healthier. He said kids will run around and play games outside not because it’s competitive, but because it’s fun, like all you need is a playground and a ball to keep kids from getting obese.
Littlefield needs to leave skinny New England more often. There are playgrounds and balls all over the country, yet child obesity continues to rise. It’s a major problem in rural areas, but the obesity epidemic is growing everywhere, as Bad Blood, the recent New York Times series on Diabetes makes clear. There’s obviously a major problem, and Littlefield refuses to recognize that traditional methods aren’t addressing it.
Read the rest of Monica taking Littlefield to task.
When Christmas rolled around last month, and my family wanted to know what to get me, I emailed them links to PZ Myers’ Updated Book List for Evolutionists. As a result, I came home with copies of Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautifu and Andrew Brown’s The Darwin Wars.
Myers describes The Darwin Wars as “a study of the sociology of evolutionary biology.” In reality, it is little more than a blow-by-blow account of the ‘war’ between Richard Lewontin and Steven Jay Gould on the one hand, and E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett on the other. It is, here and there, a lot of fun. He describes the birth of Richard Dawkins as having been attended by a pair of fairies.
The good fairy gave him good looks, intelligence, charm, and a chair at Oxford specially endowed for him. The bad fairy studied him for a while and said: `Give him a gift for metaphor.’
Elsewhere, he quotes biologist John Maynard Smith descirbing a theory as “Absolute fucking crap,” and the footnote attributes this to “Personal communication, walking back from the pub.”
If you were on any Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) trains or in any stations recently (which I certainly wasn’t), you might have noticed some ads from a rather provocative campaign (via FindLaw):
The ads criticize Roe v. Wade and ask: “Abortion: Have we gone too far?” They also contain specific anti-abortion arguments, such as this one: “The Supreme Court says you can choose: after the heart starts beating, after its arms and legs appear, after all organs are present, after the sex is apparent, after it sucks its thumb, after it responds to sounds, after it could survive outside the womb.”