Why did Blogger delete ERV’s blog?

Many science bloggers are asking why Blogger.com deleted a science blog, ERV (endogenous retrovirus). The blogger, Abbie Smith, is a graduate student in HIV research. She has shown herself quite capable of debating pesudoscience floggers such as Michael Behe, pointing out their mistakes and lies, demanding proof of their claims, and tapping her foot while they come up empty. For this Behe calls her “some woman” (not HIV researcher, not grad student, not young scientist) who’s a Mean Girl.

And then a couple of days ago her blog suddenly disappeared from Blogger. It isn’t full of links. It’s not spam. So what happened? Did some creationists complain about her? Did Blogger yank the plug without investigating? Inquiring minds want to know, but there doesn’t seem to be any place to ask that question.

ERV is back on blogger for now with no explanation offered as to the breach of service. ERV is pulling up stakes and transferring her articles to Scienceblogs.com, where there’s a committment to actually supporting science bloggers. Scienceblogs hosts the most popular science blog in the world, Pharyngula, and I expect the site to attract much more traffic for ERV.

Blogger’s treatment of ERV has made me think that I’d better accelerate the transfer of my blog to WordPress, especially since Blogger’s kludgy published procedure for backing up a blog backs up only the last 500 posts.

Travel day: Washington to Pennsylvania

After the museum, it’s a short drive in the cold rain to our friends in Pennsylvania.

Swimming and dinosaurs

I took LotStreetWiz to his swimming course again. This morning it starts at 8:00 and finishes at 14:30.

I’ll be off to see the dinos as soon as my camera battery recharges. The Miami marathon is on today so I’ll be avoiding the running route if possible.

Science Blogging Conference

I’m in North Carolina, attending a conference on science blogging. It’s being held at Research Triangle Park and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was a loooong drive.

Happy New Year!

This medieval conception of the unviverse is a free image from Wikipedia.

Random chance or Wrathful Dispersion?

Q_pheevr has a delightful parody of Intelligent Design transported to the field of linguistics. “Wrathful Dispersion theory” echoes every argument of “Intelligent Design theory”—but is it just Babelism in disguise?

"Dinosaurs Make an Impression"

Speaking of Kevin Padian, as I just did in the “Macroevolution primer,” here’s a tidbit from the past.

The cover article for Nature (May, 1999) describes how StudioTools^TM computer modelling and design software from Alias|wavefront is used to analyze dinosaur tracks and to explain a mysterious, apparent “spur” mark in each track, sometimes supposed to be from a “reversed hallux” or backward-facing toe.

At that time I was at Alias|wavefront helping to document a new version of StudioTools^TM. I attended a talk by the author, Kevin Padian. He described how used the software was used to model a mud surface and a dinosaur’s foot, then trace its motion in three dimensions, discovering that the “spur” was an artifact of how the foot entered the mud. I’m pretty sure that our resident scientist, Bill Buxton, found the research opportunity and donated a copy of the software.

See also “How Dinosaurs Walked the Walk.”

Related book: It’s ten years old, but the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, edited by Philip J. Currie* and Kevin Padian,** still looks very interesting.

*Curator of Dinosaurs at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta
**Professor of Integrative Biology and Curator of Lower Vertebrates in the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley

Books about Science vs. Religion

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, David P. Barash briefly reviews eleven recent books about the gulf, or conflict, between science and religion.
Caution: in transcription to a Web page, some of the words in the review were mashed together: appealto, authoras, theirsto, etc.

The books reviewed are these:

• Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking Press, 2006)
• The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, by Edward O. Wilson (W.W. Norton, 2006)
• Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
• Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, by Joan Roughgarden (Island Press, 2006)
• Evolving God: A Provocative View of the Origins of Religion, by Barbara J. King (Doubleday, 2007)
• The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S. Collins (The Free Press, 2006)
• Letter to a Christian Nation, by Sam Harris (Knopf, 2006)
• Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, by Pascal Boyer (Basic Books, 2002)
• Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, by Lewis Wolpert (W.W. Norton, 2007)
• The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

Hat tip to PZ Myers at Pharyngula for the book reviews. As he rightly points out, these reviews are too brief; but if any of the books sound interesting, you can look them up.

Update: ChemBob mentions another book: Victor J. Stenger’s “God, the Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist” (2007).

Science Notes book review: "Toronto Rocks" by Nick Eyles

Hands up everybody who knows that Casa Loma sits on the shore of an ancient lake formed by glacial meltwater.

Nick Eyles’ book will clue you in to the geology of Toronto and the surrounding region. It comes complete with maps, cross-sectional diagrams, and a history of the Toronto area in stones. The author describes everything from the ancient formation of North America from smaller sub-continental plates to the recent sediments that form the Don Valley Brickworks.

Here are a few of the things I learned:
* The fossil corals I saw in my childhood are from a Devonian coral reef in Port Colborne on Lake Erie.
* A boundary between ancient subcontinents or “terranes” passes through the Niagara Peninsula and the Toronto region.
* The boundary between terranes is magnetized and guides migrating birds to form a major flyway.
* Fine banded rocks called “varves” are displaying yearly sedimentation layers, thus forming a fine-grained record of past conditions.
* The Scarborough Bluffs in eastern Toronto are a nearly complete record of the Pleistocene glaciations.
* Terrane movements are causing a visible buckling upwards and breaking of the the sedimentary rocks near Port Colborne.
* You can see a geological fault in the Rouge River Valley, exposed in the sediments on Twyn Rivers Drive.
* Much of Toronto’s geological history can be read in the Don Valley Brickworks, which went down to Toronto’s bedrock, the Georgian Bay Shale, which is fossil-bearing rock 440 million years old.
* A. P. Coleman, a Toronto geologist, proved that there had been several ice ages, not one, interspersed with warm interglacial periods. He thus disproved Lord Kelvin’s theory that the earth had been cooling since its formation.
* J. Tuzo Wilson, a Toronto geophysicist, helped to explain plate tectonics. (I knew that.) There’s a 400-million year cycle of forming and breaking up supercontintents, which is named the Wilson Cycle after him. (I didn’t know that.)

There are just a few small things that make me wish he could have afforded an editor for his first book. He’s a bit random about commas. And in one place he refers to 6 metres in a kilometer as a 6% grade. That’s either 60 metres in a kilometer (my guess) or a 0.6% grade.

I did a search for books by Nick Eyles and discovered that he has written a book on the geology of Ontario and has another one coming out this summer on the geology of Canada. Each one covers a bigger area and costs more.

Quoting Franz Weidenreich

Franz Weidenreich, Morphology of Solo Man:

“But the limit of tolerance for these human foibles is obtained when the proponent of a questionable scientific doctrine endeavors to maintain it against all possible odds by misrepresentation, misinformation and suppression of contradictory data, and by insinuating unfairness in opponents of his views.”

Hat tip to Afarensis for the quotation.