Cops on camera

Cops Frame Woman for Routine Accident:
[Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars]

An accident that was their fault, by the way, because they hit her from behind. Four police officers from Hollywood, Florida are caught on camera inventing evidence and plotting to falsify police reports to frame an innocent woman that they ran into with a police car. New professionalism, indeed. Video below the fold.

[More]

What is just jaw-dropping is that the cops knew they were being filmed and recorded by their own cameras yet they still talked about the frame up on camera. This would indicate that they felt the film would never see the light of day. As the reporter says, this calls into question every single DWI that these 4 policemen were involved in.

Nothing like a little transparency to keep people honest, I guess. Although I expect in the future that the police conspirators will just make sure they are off camera when they plot. Maybe we will then have to put wireless cameras and mikes on every cop in order to make sure they do their job with covering up malfeasance?

Technorati Tags: Technology

A refreshing bit of music

Perhaps hominids are not the only animals that appreciate music. Case in point:

Technorati Tags: General

More gaps filled in

by Rennett Stowe
Scientists find that chimps were born to appreciate music:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

Chimpanzees are biologically programmed to appreciate pleasant music.

The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music.

That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds, say scientists in the journal Primates.

Until now, this was thought to be a universal human trait, but the new finding suggests it evolved in the ancestors of humans and modern apes.

[More]

One of the arguments made by Wallace and Collins is that certain traits only found in humans are a sign of the Creator’s touch. As I discussed yesterday, Wallace believed that musical ability was one of these traits.

Yet here we have another hominid who can do something no other animal besides man has been shown to do – tell the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sounds and choose the ‘good’ sounds.

Natural selection has no problem with the finding that other apes appreciate music. But it undercuts any theory that these traits are only found in Man and signal the divine hand of a Creator.

Science continually fills in the gaps. There are fewer and fewer ones for scientists like Collins to fit their theories into. Because science works to figure out what we do not currently understand. Faith is a poor substitute in that area.

Technorati Tags: Science