Slashdot Mirror

http://scienceblogs.com/zooillogix/simpsons_CrazyCatLady.gif

According to Wikipedia, Thomas Huxley created the term "Darwinism". Try again. Plenty of people speak of "Darwinism". Dawkins uses the term "Darwinism" 18 times in The Selfish Gene. If I remember correctly, Popper used the term as he was trying to argue that evolutionary thought (at the time, since he later recanted this claim after being exposed to new evidence) was not scientific.

Maybe i was too young to remember clearly at the time, but i don't remember the environmentalists getting up in arms about the global cooling stuff. It made the covers of newspapers because it was sensationalist, but there was no crusade behind it like there was with DDT or the ozone layer or such. I'm not sure why you're blaming the environmentalists on that one.

As for DDT, maybe you're not the one making stuff up, but you're swallowing what other people made up, hook line and sinker.

In many cases DDT use wasn't discontinued because of pressure from environmentalist groups, but phased out because either the number of cases was so low that it wasn't believed necessary anymore or because insects were actually developing a resistance to it.

There has never been a worldwide ban on the use of DDT for vector control, and many of the people most involved in controlling malaria are glad that its use as an agricultural pesticide has been banned because it slows the rate at which insects are developing a resistance to it. Currently 4000-5000 tons of it are used every year for vector control. Although in many places they've switched to alternative chemicals, again because of fears of (or the actuality of) resistance.

I'm not going to claim that the environmentalists response didn't have any negative impact, but the anti-environmentalists habitually either misrepresent the facts or outright lie in their criticisms of them and exaggerate the consequences for shock value. I used to be a staunch supporter of the hardcore environmentalists, but then i learned a little of the truth and got disillusioned. Then i learned even more of the truth and got disillusioned with the anti-environmentalists and their own version of scaremongering. Each side has some combination of philosophical fanaticism and economic agenda to push, and are willing to bend or even shatter the truth to accomplish it.

If you're actually concerned with the truth, stop spreading the anti-environmentalists lies and starting looking for the truth in between. If you're an active anti-environmentalist, well clearly nothing i say is going to convince you otherwise, but spreading such obvious lies (once you actually think to look into them) is only going to hurt your cause in the end. If you want to _really_ criticize the environmentalists, criticize them for things that are actually 100% true, like their opposition to nuclear power (although when you do that remember that at least some environmental groups have wised up and changed their tune recently.)

They are NOT agreed.

Sure they are, as Oreskes already showed back in 2004. And don't come back with the ridiculous (and unpublished) Peiser study, which even Peiser has eventually conceeded was wrong.

Look dude, now (2009) that even Lindzen has canned the skeptical rhetoric, it can be positively stated that "scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions," without fear of contradiction, at least from anyone even moderately well informed.

Scientists who study the climate agree that the climate is changing. What is not yet agreed upon is if the specific 'why' this time is due solely, or even partly, to human-introduced CO2

Except "97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing global warming".

Falcon

As far as I know, scientists do not agree that we must reduce our carbon emissions to stop global warming.

Those who are experts in the subject, Climatologists, do agree. "97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing global warming".

Falcon

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Academia Brasiliera de CiÃncias (Bazil)

...among others.

Definitely take a look at the first link if you want to know how to talk to a global warming sceptic.

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Academia Brasiliera de CiÃncias (Bazil)

...among others.

Definitely take a look at the first link if you want to know how to talk to a global warming sceptic.

Yes, and changing the population of gut bacteria in mice can control whether the mice stay thin or get fat.

Briefly, mice with no gut bacteria were innoculated with bacteria from either obese or lean mice. The animals given bacteria from obese mice got fat, the animals given bacteria from lean mice stayed thin. There's a good writeup here.

The details for humans aren't known, but it seems likely that it's basically the same for us. I used to know a guy who worked on classifying gut bacteria. He was always desperate for samples so almost all of his friends had, at some stage,kept a food diary then provided him with a turd in a box to work on. It's important work, but we were all secretly afraid that our samples were actually going into the construction of some sort of shrine...

Also: farts are gas released by your gut bacteria, not directly from you. So if you have a particularly deadly brand it's not your fault, it's your bacteria.

Yea - a high-def version of this!

All answers for global warming sceptics:

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

and in particular to this section:

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/there-is-no-consensus.php

where you will find that the following groups endorse the global warming theory:

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Academia Brasiliera de CiÃncias (Bazil)

...among others.

Definitely take a look at the first link if you want to know how to talk to a global warming sceptic.

All answers for global warming sceptics:

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2008/07/how_to_talk_to_a_sceptic.php

and in particular to this section:

http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/02/there-is-no-consensus.php

where you will find that the following groups endorse the global warming theory:

National Academy of Sciences (United States of America)

Royal Society of Canada

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Academié des Sciences (France)

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany)

Indian National Science Academy

Accademia dei Lincei (Italy)

Science Council of Japan

Russian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society (United Kingdom)

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Academy of Sciences Malaysia

Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Academia Brasiliera de CiÃncias (Bazil)

...among others.

Definitely take a look at the first link if you want to know how to talk to a global warming sceptic.

(oh and there is obviously a difference between Christians and hippies, for starters the fact that Christians actually have a purpose and generally act very sensibly)

nonsense: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/01/another_shooting.php

I was having trouble visualizing how this works but then I found this link with a diagram of the eye's anatomy

Humans are capable of it. You might be interested in this video: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/12/blind_man_navigates_obstacle_course_perfectly_with_no_visual.php

It's about a blind man with the ability to navigate a hallway full of obstacles. Pretty amazing. Basically, he has brain damage and is not consciously aware of sight but other, lower-level processing (like obstacle avoidance) is still going on.

Well, "he" looks pretty good for 47.

For a really good dissection of that critique of map-reduce, have a look at the following: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2008/01/databases_are_hammers_mapreduc.php

Maybe I've just been reading too much Respectful Insolence, but I'm going to need a citation to a peer reviewed medical paper for each of those claims. What you wrote reads entirely too much like the sort of pseudoscientific twadddle you find all over the internets - four paragraphs consisting mostly of plausible-sounding but probably ultimately wrong science, with randomly scattered common sense ("Get enough exercise and fresh air") to make it all seem more reasonable.

Here is the link:

http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/10/27/intelligent_design_and_the_ala/

Just because somebody is writing for a less technically expert audience is no excuse for sensationalism, and far less for the scientifically illiterate misstatement already noted before the article was even posted on Slashdot.

This research and the following articals is nothing but bullshit. It didn't stand up to peer-review progress.

See here.

http://www.scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/11/prediction_selfpromoting_hype.php

I admit I've never actually read Gould or Dawkins, but my impression of PE has always been exactly what you're describing here: evolution doesn't happen at the steady pace that Darwin expected. Sometimes it's really fast because the environment just changed dramatically and there's lots of new stuff to adapt to, and sometimes really slow because the population is as well adapted to its environment as is feasible.

I have read a bit of both (but IANAEB), and it appears to me that for the most part evolution is reasonably gradual, although not so gradual under extreme conditions that you cannot observe it over human lifespans. The Pullitzer prize winning The Beak of the Finch is a good example of severe evoutionary pressure promoting observable, but still gradual, evolutionay change.

Experiments with e. coli show that both kinds of evolution have been observed in the lab, too. In this case the emergence of a gene to process a new food source was 'aburpt' but keep in mind that the experiment has been running 20 years in this case, and it took many, probably tens or even hundreds of generations, for the mutation to become observable in any gross sense.

PZ Myers had a bit of commentary on this news on his blog, pharyngula.

I'd encourage everyone here to read the post, as well as some of the comments from readers below. The press release is self-contradictory, and extremely vague in terms of details. I'm not expecting too much, but like PZ, I'll give the actual paper a read whenever I can find it.

Who knows, maybe they've found something truly revolutionary... but you can't tell from the press clipping. Ask yourself how often you've seen something science related in the paper, then found out that it bears very little resemblence to reality when you go to read the actual scientist's research papers on the subject? :P

Don't take my word for it, take the word of a cellular biologist.

Some good points, but in the old model all promoters etc. interact with proteins.
Hence I would call the fact that not all gene effects are mediated by protein (maybe not even the majority) a paradigm shift. Especially considering that a lot of these ncRNAs might be much weirder then microRNAs.

Don't take my word for it, take the word of a cellular biologist.

Note that the files that are available only contain "preliminary exon data". Large portions of the files are low-quality sequences with no real genetic information. See also this article, called "PGP sequence data disappointing":
http://scienceblogs.com/geneticfuture/2008/10/pgp_sequence_data_disappointin.php

Apparently, the files are in FASTQ format:
http://www.ira.cinvestav.mx:8080/bioperl/Bio/SeqIO/fastq.html

I gotcher cite right here.

evolving any significant changes

i.e. speciation, and

genetic variability

. On one hand the points you make and other factors of the modern world are likely to inhibit speciation. While unintuitively these same factors may enhance the genetic variability of the whole population.

For instance widespread easy travel (Point A) means that one method of speciation, where two populations who are separated over a long time will naturally drift apart, is prevented.
Conversely the genetic mixing of these populations which we are experiencing now will bring together different variations much quicker. Genetic variations which may never have had a chance to be together before in the same organism.

To keep it short he is both right and wrong, depending on what you picture evolution to be. Either way I don't think the discussion is important because generally species appear constant over long periods of time. Who knows where we will be in 50,000 years time.

This link is worth reading and explains one way evolution will keep on happening. Evolution stops only when we stop breeding. Oh wait, he's right - for Slashdot ;)

There's a blog post from PZ Myers on Pharyngula that addresses this statement from Steve Jones fairly well I think. Read it in full here
 

This[the idea that older men have more mutations in their sperm] is true, but it makes no sense. It's not as if younger fathers produce no mutations -- they generate plenty. It's a difference in degree, nothing more, so we still have plenty of new mutations percolating into the population. And of course, over most of human history parents have been relatively young, since you couldn't count on living to the age of 35.

And then there's this odd argument.

        Another factor is the weakening of natural selection. "In ancient times half our children would have died by the age of 20. Now, in the Western world, 98 per cent of them are surviving to 21."

That makes even less sense. Natural selection is going to eliminate variants; by reducing its effects, we permit more mutations to persist in the population. One moment he's complaining that fewer mutations are being produced, the next he's complaining that the mutants are thriving. Which is it?

tl;dr = Steve Jones is full of wacky.

Ken Thompson talks about using untrusted compilers in his lecture, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".

(See also: this)

Your Guardian article confirms that he wasn't misquoted at all. Mind you, I don't believe for a minute that he's a creationist, but his attitude to the issue was wrong. As you can see from the links below, there is more than one side to the issue, but on balance, I'm glad he's gone.

For more diverse and in-depth discussions on the topic than you'll find on Slashdot (mainly because they have been going on longer) have a look at for example:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/michael_reisss_big_mistake.php
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3100,n,n
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3119,n,n

The first Q&A is posted on one of the organizer's blogs:
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2008/08/barack_obamas_answers_science.php

Another is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/08/obama_on_science.php and here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/2008/08/sciencedebate08_obama_takes_up.php

The first Q&A is posted on one of the organizer's blogs:
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2008/08/barack_obamas_answers_science.php

Another is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/08/obama_on_science.php and here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/2008/08/sciencedebate08_obama_takes_up.php

The first Q&A is posted on one of the organizer's blogs:
http://scienceblogs.com/intersection/2008/08/barack_obamas_answers_science.php

Another is here:
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2008/08/obama_on_science.php and here:
http://scienceblogs.com/deepseanews/2008/08/sciencedebate08_obama_takes_up.php

Well, she's not... anymore. She very quickly backpedaled when confronted.

http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2006/10/27/intelligent_design_and_the_ala/

This was posted in Pharyngula yesterday. The usual prescient commenters noted that nowhere on the researchers' pages was there active speculation about an "invisibility cloak", and it was probably just some reporters going wacky over the possibilities. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/08/get_your_invisibility_cloak_he.php

And that of the people predicting climate disaster now many are the same ones that predicted climate disaster back in the '70's, but the other way (ice-age).

Oh really? Who are these people who are predicting ice ages in the 1970s, and which of them are today predicting climate disaster?

"Scientists in the 1970s were predicting an imminent ice age" is a myth, based on basically one paper by Rasool and Schneider, plus some confusion with scientists talking about ice ages in thousands or tens of thousands of years.

You might read this to start.

And they're all dead wrong.

On the contrary, they reproduce temperatures quite well and precipitation decently.

The data is really spotty until 50 years or so ago so there's no idea how accurate they are.

We have reasonable data for over 100 years, and even 50 years of data tells us a lot about how accurate they are, as the measurement error is quite smaller than the visible trend.

None of them are predictive.

That's nonsense. Even a simple two-equation energy balance model is decently predictive for global temperature, and the GCMs do much better, not just time trends but also spatial patterns, for atmospheric and ocean temperatures, top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes, precipitation at least at the zonal level, etc.

And none of them match the spotty historical data without what they call "forcing"

You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?

Of course they don't match the historical data without forcing. Forcing is what makes the climate change: changes in greenhouse gases, solar irradiance, sulphate aerosols, etc. With no forcing, the climate just hovers around an equilibrium state.

You're simply saying "models can't reproduce warming temperatures unless you include a source of heating". Well duh.

and what everyone else calls "fiddling with parameters until it looks kinda right".

Again, duh. Pretty much every model in the world requires its parameters to be calibrated from data; you can pretty much never calculate anything from first principles, unless you're talking particle physics. That doesn't mean that models aren't predictive. The question is whether you can adjust the parameters to reproduce the observed climate without substantial input from anthropogenic forcings, and the answer is no.

Here's an interesting paper (from a real journal).

That's not a real journal, it's an un-peer reviewed newsletter, and the paper was written by a journalist, not a scientist. Monckton's "critique" is just a horrible train wreck of absurd errors, some of which are being detailed here, here, and here.

Since you quote that part specifically, I should note that his claim that the IPCC takes its feedbacks from one paper is absurd. The feedback factor is just another word for "climate sensitivity"; model based computations of the feedbacks are found in chapter 8 of the latest IPCC WG1 report, and observational estimates of the sensitivity are found in chapter 9. The relevant sections cite dozens of papers.

Dismissing valid objections with supporting evidence just because it doesn't say "Climate Modeller" on a business card is foolish.

Let me know when you have any valid objections with supporting evidence.

http://www.desmogblog.com/who-is-rocket-scientist-david-evans

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/07/the_australians_war_on_science_16.php

Yah, I know, typical liberal media, cirkular links, etc.

http://www.google.com/search?q=rocket+scientist+david+evans

Not a rocket scientist. Not a climatologist. Not a top anything. Average Windows programmer. Cashing in on "consulting" for think-tanks.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the "red" wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its "jamminess," while another enjoyed its "crushed red fruit." Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

The second test Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle was a fancy grand-cru. The other bottle was an ordinary vin du table. Despite the fact that they were actually being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the differently labeled bottles nearly opposite ratings. The grand cru was "agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded," while the vin du table was "weak, short, light, flat and faulty". Forty experts said the wine with the fancy label was worth drinking, while only 12 said the cheap wine was.

Read the complete article here.

Enough of this "We found a cure! We're headed to trials!" crap. We've seen this for the past 20 years, yet NONE of these 'cures' are actually used on a daily basis. Either put up, or shut up.

OK, sure. Have a look at the Kaplan-Meier curves for survival for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia in children. In the 60's your child's chance of long term cancer free survival was less than 10%. Today, your child's chance of long term cancer free survival is in the 90% range. http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/06/support_cancer_research_now.php Orignial article: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/2/166

While big leaps and bounds are great. The progress in cancer treatment and research is made through slow and consistent work at the same problem. More power to these people. But each one of these 'we're headed to trials' announcements is one grain of sand - possibly a big one - working toward grinding the machine to a halt.

It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.

Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies and all the major scientific institutions, solidly behind the warning that the temperature is rising, anthropogenic CO2 is the primary cause, and it will worsen unless we reduce emissions.

In the 1970s, there was a book in the popular press, a few articles in popular magazines, and a small amount of scientific speculation based on the recently discovered glacial cycles and the recent slight cooling trend from air pollution blocking the sunlight. There were no daily headlines. There was no avalanche of scientific articles. There were no United Nations treaties or commissions. No G8 summits on the dangers and possible solutions. No institutional pronouncements. You could find broader "consensus" on a coming alien invasion.

Quite simply, there is no comparison.

If you want some additional detail, Real Climate has discussed this, and William Connelly has made a hobby of gathering everything that was written about global cooling at the time.

(From: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/23/18534/222)

The "C is Efficient" Language Fallacy
http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/the_c_is_efficient_language_fa.php

It's the language of choice for writing a kernel and drivers, and even that much is easily debatable.

The real reason it manages to stick around is that it's the lingua franca of 3rd party libraries.

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/ has an excellent write up of why this is not possible in the way it should work according to the description.

To get started learning about skepticism read blogs and listen to podcasts such as these:

http://www.skeptic.com/index.html
http://www.badastronomy.com/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/
http://whatstheharm.net/index.html
http://www.expelledexposed.com/

Then when you find a science topic you are interested in, read a lot of books about it so that you can be comfortable enough with the topic to think critically about new discoveries and claims and to explain it to others.

The blogs I listed tend to recommend more good books than I can keep up with.

Be warned though. Skepticism and science are addictive and fun and tend to piss off the intellectually lazy.

Better writeup (and video) at:
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2008/06/02/a_new_step_in_evolution.php

No, either you're misunderstanding or I'm not being clear. (Or I'm misunderstanding you). The first amendment does apply to them; what they did violated both the law and the constitution. There is discrimination against Christians, and when it does happen it's bad; see also a reference to an apparent bible club case, and a situation involving a wrestling coach and his assistant. I just don't think the cluelessness of school officials about the constitution has anything much to do with "political correctness" and I see the position you took in that original post that Christians are somehow the "real" targets of discrimination now as absurd; discrimination against them is neither greater than or more acceptable than discrimination against other groups, particularly under the law. Laws and the Constitution are broken and have to be defended; if they weren't ever broken they'd be somewhat unnecessary.

If you cannot find anything beyond the initial filing, the case must be false and thrown out. Also if several eye witnesses placed the Vice Principle at the school, but he claims he wasn't there, the case should be thrown out as well. Even if the child was written up and the lawyer showed the papers in court for having a bible as an offense. Then the money for the civil suit ran out and the case had to be dropped.

No, not finding any more information about the first case just meant I couldn't find any more information about it. Single articles, however, rarely give the full picture so I wanted to know more; it is certainly plausible. As for the other case, if you have any source for more information, I'd be happy to see it (Especially if they showed the writeup she got, which is information I hadn't found).

I find him amusing as all hell!

Go ahead... Laugh along with Louis Savain!