Get Cynical

Plenty of reporters still in their Britney Spears Department though:

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers. Mediabistro’s TVNewser broke the story.

“We want to integrate environmental, science and technology reporting into the general editorial structure rather than have a stand alone unit,” said CNN spokesperson Barbara Levin. “Now that the bulk of our environmental coverage is being offered through the Planet in Peril franchise, which is produced by the Anderson Cooper 360 program, there is no need for a separate unit.”

A source at the network, who asked not to be named, said the move is a strategic and structural business decision to cut staff, unrelated to the current economic downturn. Financially, “CNN is doing very, very well,” the source said, and none of the health and medical news staff has been cut. Yet the big question, of course, is whether or not the reorganization will decrease the overall amount of CNN’s science, technology, and environment coverage. CNN says no, but it’s hard to imagine that it won’t—Anderson Cooper or not, fewer people is fewer people.

(via Gerry Canavan)

Just kind of stand near the door and wait for a push.

From Flightography.

(via Hacked Gadgets)

From FoxNews:

HENDERSON, Texas — A young East Texas couple was arraigned Wednesday on capital murder charges accusing them of beating the woman’s 1-year-old daughter to get rid of “the demons.”

Authorities said that the child was also bitten more than 20 times.

Blaine Milam, 19, and Jessica Carson, 18, remained jailed Wednesday in lieu of a $2 million bond for each.

They were arrested Tuesday after Rusk County Sheriff’s deputies responding to a 911 call found 13-month-old Amora Bain Carson beaten. Investigators think the couple used a hammer to “beat the demons out” of Amora, Carson’s daughter.

Lt. Reynold Humber said that the couple told detectives various stories on how the child was injured, including that the toddler was in an auto accident and attacked by the family’s dogs. They even said that the child beat herself in the head with a hammer.

“They had multiple stories they went through before they told us they had beaten the child to death,” he told The Tyler Morning Telegraph for its Wednesday editions.

Humber said the couple eventually told deputies the child was possessed and they were trying to rid her of demons.

(via Angry Astronomer)

(via PoeTV)

YouTube did a major overhaul to their site and so far everybody pretty much agrees that it sucks.

Personally, I’m really hating this obnoxious search bar at the top of every embedded video. I don’t even understand the point of it. When I want to search for a video, I go to YouTube and do a search instead of searching on an embedded video where the results end up being cramped. And if you accidentally mouse over a video while it’s playing the search bar comes down obscuring the top of what’s playing. Major Fail.

A collection of every reference in Star Trek to “I’m a doctor, not a…”

“What am I, a doctor or a moon-shuttle conductor?” (TOS: “The Corbomite Maneuver”)

“I don’t know, Jim. This is a big ship. I’m just a country doctor.” (TOS: “The Alternative Factor”)

“Look, I’m a doctor, not an escalator.” (TOS: “Friday’s Child”)

(via delicious.com/WCityMike)

Roger Ebert’s scathing and funny belated review of Stein’s ‘Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed’.

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, they will look like death warmed over. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

That is simply one revealing fragment. This film is cheerfully ignorant, manipulative, slanted, cherry-picks quotations, draws unwarranted conclusions, makes outrageous juxtapositions (Soviet marching troops representing opponents of ID), pussy-foots around religion (not a single identified believer among the ID people), segues between quotes that are not about the same thing, tells bald-faced lies, and makes a completely baseless association between freedom of speech and freedom to teach religion in a university class that is not about religion.

Many systems of religion must have existed many ages before
the art of writing was discovered, and must have passed through
many changes before the stories, miracles, histories, prophecies
and mistakes became fixed and petrified in written words. After
that, change was possible only by giving new meanings to old words,
a process rendered necessary by the continual acquisition of facts
somewhat inconsistent with a literal interpretation of the “sacred
records.” In this way an honest faith often prolongs its life by
dishonest methods; and in this way the Christians of to-day are
trying to harmonize the Mosaic account of creation with the
theories and discoveries of modern science.

Robert Green Ingersoll – “Some Mistakes of Moses” (1879)