When Michael Pollan described in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” some of the impacts of industrial scale nitrogen-fertilizer farming, he wrote passionately about the Des Moines river in Iowa: But what happens to the one hundred pounds of synthetic nitrogen that Naylor’s corn plants don’t take up? Some of it evaporates into […]
You may or may not like Mitt Romney. You may or may not like Barack Obama. But these past two weeks, despite all the scripted speeches and propaganda sloganeering of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, one of these two demonstrated political courage and the other did not. The scientific […]
The Texas Republican Party platform document was amusing (and scary); as I discussed earlier, it implied that the party called for banning the teaching of critical thinking. This whetted my appetite for the National Republican Party platform, a document which was expected to take the whole party further to the […]
Correction (6/12/2013): I originally referred to a vaccine containing multiple vaccinations as both “comcomitant” and “conjugate.” In fact, a “conjugate” vaccine is different; it is one where an antigen is attached to a protein from the same parent organism in an attempt to confer the immunological properties of the carrier […]
An article caught my attention today, written by Linda B. Blackford for Kentucky.com. The article, entitled, “GOP lawmakers question standards for teaching evolution in Kentucky,” [1] contained some choice quotes that exposed the bald motivations of legislators opposing the teaching of Natural Selection (the only established unifying principle of all […]
Below are photographs I took during a recent vacation in Wisconsin. These were all taken on a nature walk in Park Falls, WI. I very much enjoyed the contrast of these flashes of natural Wisconsin beauty interspersed with the human industry that helps support the town. [imagebrowser id=1]
More scenes from Wisconsin. http://steve.cooleysekula.net/blog/2012/08/03/scenes-from-a-drive-through-wisconsin-part-2/ This was posted on Google+…
I am a baptized Christian in the American Baptist Church. But I am also a critical thinker. Many people call today “free speech day.” Many others think this is a day to support Chick-fil-A. Even more others think that today is a day when Christians clearly show their homophobia by […]
The recent flap over Chick-fil-a President Dan Cathy’s comments regarding the rights of homosexuals to marry is a useful petri dish in which to study the U.S. problem with equal rights for heterosexuals and homosexuals. This controversy has been littered with all kinds of contradictions, hypocrisies, and logical fallacies. Let’s […]