morning goodness

Out of the blue there arrived this morning an e-mail that's had me smiling all day. Its sender has since been kind enough to say I can quote it here:

Hi,

I never usually do fan mail, but I thought I would write to express my appreciation for Discarded Science.

I am a university lecturer in evolutionary biology in Liverpool, UK, and I think that the book is terrific. It will be on my reading lists next year, as I am sure that my MSc students will gain a lot from reading it.

Mike Speed
Biological Sciences,
University of Liverpool

And later, in Dr Speed's note granting me permission to quote him:

I have ordered some copies for the University Library (actually I picked it up in my local library - and have just bought it along with Corrupted Science, which looks equally superb).

It's at times like this that all the unpleasant crank hate mail from pious Creationists and wingnut climate-change deniers -- not to mention the loyal Bushies -- seems somehow worth it. Thank you, Dr Speed!

blowhard bulletin

There's an item by John Byrne on Raw Story that I imagine won't be featured prominently in your newspaper or tv news bulletin, but which deserves to be. Here's a sample:

Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, and lasts six seconds before saying its torture

Chicago radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller decided he'd get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn't torture.

It didn't turn out that way. "Mancow," in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul.

[. . .]

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

The upshot? "It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke," Mancow told listeners. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"Absolutely. I mean that's drowning," he added later. "It is the feeling of drowning."

"If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it," he said.

And now, of course, we wait for Sean Hannity -- another vicious blowhard who knows for a fact that waterboarding is barely more than a varsity prank -- to fulfil his pledge to undergo the experience.

I expect that (a) we'll have to wait a very long time and (b) Hannity will continue to broadcast far and wide as indisputable truth that waterboarding is no big deal.