Carnivals, Liberal and otherwise

The ninth Carnival of the Liberals is a mostly religion edition, and since it's hosted at an atheism site, the results are pretty predictable. Much to my surprise, there's a Mark Rayner satire there that isn't really political at all, though it is a nice little piece. There's also satire on Genesis which is good. The rest of it's pretty predictable if you've been reading Skeptics Circle or God/Not God or Butterflies and Wheels, etc.

This, on the other hand, is not satire: it's full bore self-reflection and repentence. For the record, I'm not one of those people who "supported the invasion or insufficiently challenged the administration as it schemed [or are] currently making the evasive "incompetence" argument": I was standing on a street corner with a peace sign on the day the invasion started and have never stopped saying that "the administration is incompetent, but even more essentially, it is corrupt and dangerously wrong in its fundamental philosophy of governing."

You know, I think it's time to update the Impeachment Index....

Science! The fiftieth Tangled Bank science blog roundup is a blast!

For example: The angle at which a confession is videotaped dramatically affects jurors' outcomes, so the question then becomes: knowing this, will (and should) police alter their interrogation videotaping behavior? I think I'm going to have to add Cognitive Daily to my reading lists: Ever since I read this Harvard Magazine overview of behavioral economics, I've been considerably less sanguine about the neutrality of my own thought processes....

Also: A Scientific American blogger has created a taxonomy of Global Warming Skeptics, with seven major categories by primary objection. This is like the homework for an entire semester of environmental science: how do you convince these people?

This dialogue is both politically and scientifically devastating (and really belongs in the Carnival of Satire, as well). This rock is way cool. And tea might be the answer, especially since "research suggests that there is no noticeable difference in how alert one feels after drinking a cup of tea versus a cup of coffee, even though they contain different amounts of caffeine" which is just mindblowing to an organic black-coffee filtration mechanism like myself.....