Blogs / Bad Astronomy

As you may have noticed, I have ads running on this site. I was hesitant to add them initially, but have found that the expense of running the site (coupled with my time) makes them necessary. With the site redesign I’ve been able to fiddle with them a bit, making them less intrusive and all that, while still (of course) making them viewable.

Anyway, one of the things advertisers like to know are what kind of people read my site — besides the obvious things, like how smart, attractive, and superior you are in every way.

There is a survey available to help them with that. It’s anonymous, and only takes literally a couple of minutes. If you have the time, please take a moment to fill it out. To get good statistics they need a few hundred submitted. Only take it once, please, and the usual yada yada. But I’d appreciate it if you would.

Thanks.

Via the DefCon blog comes that news that Texas governor Rick Perry has appointed a creationist to head the Texas State Board of Education.

I’ll give you a moment to clean off your screen. Yes, you read that right.

At first I thought, "No, not even a politician in Texas could possibly do something that dumb, that contrary to reality, that horrifying to their kids. DefCon Blog must have gotten it wrong!"

And then I did a few searches. DefCon Blog got it right. According to the Dallas Morning News:

Texas Freedom Network president Kathy Miller … noted that in 2003, Dr. McLeroy was one of four board members who voted against proposed high school biology textbooks because he felt their coverage of evolution was “too dogmatic” and did not include possible flaws in Charles Darwin’s theory of how life on Earth evolved from lower forms.

That is straight out of the creationist tactics notebook. In case you’re not sure, the article goes on to quote McLeroy:

“It is wrong to teach opinion as fact,” he said.

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