But was he clutching his pearls when he lied

The Rachel Maddow Show Finds Old McCain C-SPAN Footage
[Via Crooks and Liars]

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Oh lookie here. Apparently Rachel Maddow loves the C-SPAN. As a part time C-SPAN junkie and fellow geek myself I can relate. Apparently after her show contacted them about the missing footage of John McCain cutting off Sen. Mark Dayton and objecting to him having another thirty seconds to debate the Iraq war, they went back to their original analog tapes and reposted the footage on their web site.

Maddow: Either Sen. McCain cannot remember that he objected to a Senator getting an extra thirty seconds to finish his remarks during the Iraq war debate or Sen. McCain knows perfectly well that this stuff happens in the Senate. It happens. And he just said it was unprecedented out of sheer hackitude.

Good for Rachel and her staff for following up on this. John McCain, thy name is hypocrite. Hackitude indeed. Hackitude and anger management problems. My apologies again for thinking Tweety had this and Rachel missed it.

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So, when McCain accused Franken of destroying the comity of the Senate, he was purposefully forgetting that he had done the same thing, that this sort of thing happens. To paraphrase ‘I’ve never seen this before, except I did the same thing 7 years ago.’ Wow! Fake outrage, thy name is McCain.

What is so cool about this story is the way the facts came out. Maddow had found the transcript of the 2002 exchange but the video available ended, just ended, before that happened. She mentioned it on one show and the guys at C-SPAN heard that, went to their old analog tapes and found the missing footage.

For those who care, the internet can fact-check your ass. At least they know that previous records are producible to demonstrate when a politician is lying or not.

And for a bipartisan example of that, look how the left wing sites are demonstrating that Obama did include the public option in his campaign, although he now denies that. While we know that politicians lie all the time, it is so much easier to catch them at it now. It makes life much more fun for those of us living in the reality-based world.

[Listening to: Young Lust from the album "Pink Box: Songs of Pink Floyd" by Elliot Easton (The Cars) & Glenn Hughes (DEEP PURPLE)]

Visual over truth

by kekremsi

The Mighty Power of Blogosaurus?
[Via The Loom]

Over the past few days, I’ve been following a tale of paleontological woe with a surprisingly happy ending.

Matt Wedel, a paleontologist, has been blogging about his experience with a television show on the Discovery Channel called Clash of the Dinosaurs. It didn’t go well. The producers edited Wedel’s interviews to turn his words around 180 degrees. For example, remember that old notion of big dinosaurs having a second brain along their spinal column? Not true! Wedel explained this, but if you tune into the show, you see Wedel essenitally saying, True!

Wedel understandably flipped out. He complained to the producers and got back a non-apology that just made him angrier. He was transformed into the terrible Blogosaurus, and with his resonant nasal cavity he let out a clarion call for his fellow blogosaurs to stampede the production company

I’ve heard this sort of story many times before, and this is where it usually ends. Blogosaurus slinks back to his office and sulks.

But today the story has another ending. Wedel now reports that someone from the Discovery Channel called him up and is going to make things right. I can only guess that blogs do actually make a difference some of the time. Or maybe just this once.

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A very nice discussion about the clash of science programs and science. In many cases, the video producers goal is to produce great visuals. That is what the medium requires. So far so good. But excellent programs require good narratives also, in order to capture people’s interest.

The problem often arises when a really nice visual narrative, loved by the producers, runs up against the facts. Does the producer drop the wonderful narrative or find some way to keep it in, even if it requires twisting some of the words of the scientists.

As long as producers have no real pressure to get the facts right (and things like Nostradamus 2012 indicate that this is obviously true) misrepresentation will be a worry. This does present a conundrum. Many researchers want to get the science out to a lay audience. But the wrong science can be really to take back.

Perhaps the researchers should ask for some sort of final vetting of the program for reality. But I have real doubts about this actually working. I have a hard time seeing producers letting go of great visuals simply because the narrative is weak. All you have to do is look at Avatar to see this.

[Listening to: Mystery from the album "Tyranny" by Shadow Gallery]

Explosive duck penises

Kinkiness Beyond Kinky

[Via The Loom]

There comes a time in every science writer’s career when one must write about glass duck vaginas and explosive duck penises.

That time is now.

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I had read about the weirdness of duck penises before. But the title of the paper Zimmer discusses really caught my eye :

Reference: Patricia L. R. Brennan et al, “Explosive eversion and functional morphology of the duck penis supports sexual conflict in waterfowl genitalia,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.2139

They tried to use a model female oviduct made out of silicone. The ‘explosive eversion’ broke it. The duck penis enlarges at a rate of 1.6 meters per second. Wow. There is even a video for those really kinky types.

Can a failed state be fixed?

by Bernt Rostad

Fixing California
[Via Cosmic Variance]

This past year has been a long, slow downward spiral for California into one of the worst financial crises in state history. Revised revenue projections in February led to huge slashes in funding for an array of programs from higher education to state parks, and a $25 billion budget shortfall looms next year. State employes and university (both Cal State and UC) employees have been furloughed, and UC tuition has gone up dramatically – 32% within a year. Protests at Berkeley, UCLA, and my own institution, UC Davis, led to dozens of arrests in November.

[I was amazed, the night of November 19, to see a helicopter with a powerful searchlight circling over the main administration building at UC Davis. The police, many from jurisdictions 20 miles away, had created a perimeter about 100 yards from the building, which was still occupied by students who were later arrested for trespass (and the campus police returned to find their tires slashed). The next week saw another protest, resulting in amnesty for those previously arrested...]

People are angry, and justifiably so. There are over 400,000 parents in the state who are getting a giant kick in the pants (myself among them – my daughter is at Berkeley). But who should we be angry at? Faculty? UC administration? The government in Sacramento? The global economy? What can we change that will truly fix the problems California faces?

One simple and direct idea has emerged, from a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, George Lakoff. He proposes the following 14-word amendment to the state constitution for the Nov. 2010 state ballot:

All legislative actions on revenue and budget must be determined by a majority vote.

With a million signatures, this proposition will be on the ballot next fall, and I am going to predict at this point that this will very likely be the case. If adopted, this would put an end to the 2/3 majority of the legislature required in California to enact any tax increase, and thereby end the present tyranny of the minority that hamstrings the state that I wrote about before.

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Anyone who has been following California politics knows about the tyranny of the minority. And, as is often the case, what happens in California often is then seen on a national scale. Thus the tyranny of the minority in Washington.

Perhaps California will pull back from the ledge by passing this amendment. But I would not hold my breath. A very large group of people there apparently do want a failed state, one whose tax revenues can never meet its social obligations. They have been relying on cheap tax dodges for a long, long time.

I was in California when Proposition 13 passed. This not only lowered property taxes tremendously but also inserted the requirement for a 2/3rd majority on tax issues, not only at the state level but also at the level of local government. Not too surprisingly, many of the property tax provisions have greatly benefited corporations, which continue to pay a smaller percentage of the overall tax. Funny how the companies always make out well and the average citizen can not afford to send their child to state college.

The increases in tuition at its Universities may provide some financial relief for the poorer students in the form of financial aid, but it will do little to provide for middle class students. Instate tuition will rise from about $7000 in 2009 to about $10,000 in the fall of 2010. That is enough to wake up some people but what it really indicates is the increasing problem of attending college for middle-class families.

Perhaps letting the majority determine tax policy would be a good thing and this experimentation with minority control will fade away.

[Listening to: Hopelessly Human from the album "Point of Know Return" by Kansas]