Star Wars has only seemed moderately science fiction to me. It's more like Dungeons & Dragons with technology filling in for the magic since the technology is never given scientific explanation. The heroes of Star Wars are all archetypal fantasy characters: knights, princesses, rogues, mercenaries, and the obligatory "chosen one." The whole thing romanticizes the Royalty America and France had revolutions to overcome, with its cynical portrayal of the Republic and idealization of the princess. Star Wars' overall take on humanity is cynical, where, despite living in galaxy filled with technology resembling magic, people are just as unenlightened and motivated by baser desires as they are today.
Good science fiction asks questions that pertain to the human condition and every single episode of Star Trek sets out to tackle the hard philosophical questions. Star Trek takes a positive perspective of humanity's future, with upstanding characters who seek intelligent solutions to social and technological dilemmas presented to them. The humans in Star Trek are the role-models for other species. Earth is the center of the Federation of Planets, the center of a working democratic United Nations on a galactic scale, complete with a Prime Directive to prevent a repeat of Earth's colonialist mistakes. Star Trek gets accused of being "Philosopher Kings in Space" or of presenting an idealistic vision of Communism, but these can also be seen as criticisms of the character's intellectualism and their personal virtue of serving the greater good, as academia is called elitist and humanism accused of socialism in today's society. The fact that we can even have such a debate about the sociopolitical dimensions of Star Trek make it a million-bazillion-times more nerdy than Star Wars' blaster and saber show.
Star Wars is fantasy, Star Trek is SF, and I can rant on and on and on about the differences between the two and why SF is vastly superior in every dimension, with the exception of fantasy making better escapist fare for when you want to turn off your brain for a few hours.
I was really looking forward to this device when I first heard the rumors, but the problem is that it's 7-inches. I own the current Kindle and it gives me exactly what I need for reading books: a reflective screen that saves energy so I can read off it for a month between chargings. That's all I need for reading text.
What I desperately need is a device I can read my extremely large and growing comic book collection and role-playing game PDFs on. I hate reading these on my laptop and a color touchpad seems like it would be ideal for it, but a seven inch screen is too small. I need a screen that is at least as large as a comic book page and ideally as large as a RPG book page.
I'm not going to buy any touchpad until it meets this requirement, and I'm not buying an iPad period. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks a touchpad that's slightly larger than a smartphone is worthless, but these companies keep marketing them to us and declaring "There's not market for Android touchpads" when we don't buy them. Recall Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity.
The problem isn't that the subsidies were too low, the problem is that "cheap" fuels come at a huge environmental cost that companies don't have to compensate us for. Look at mining companies. They are required by law to clean up the environmental disaster areas they create, filled with acids and toxic chemicals. What do they do when they've finished extracting all the metals and coal from an area? Declare bankruptcy to avoid the clean up costs, and create a new company to destroy the next mining site.
The Corporatists in this country have this skewed idea that clean water, air, and soil have absolutely no value until a corporation lays claim to them, but these natural resources belong to everyone. If corporations were made to compensate us for the damages they inflict on our shared environment, then the true costs of their products would be revealed and green technologies would be able to compete on a level playing field.
This reminds me of my days as an idiot juvenile delinquent, when I would shoplift from stores. Security guards would stop me occasionally, certain that I had been stealing. They would harass me and taunt me, but as long as I didn't open my trench coat, I was safe. They wouldn't dare search me and take the chance that I didn't have stolen goods on me, because they knew I'd slap them and their store with a lawsuit. The law protected a thief like me, but it's larger purpose was to protect the innocent from an invasion of privacy.
Obviously the same principle and consequences apply here. She wasn't the criminal, her privacy was invaded, and she should sue the police department and security company into the ground for damages. They majorly screwed up and this will have implications well beyond this case. It will put a damper on the methods law enforcement can use, but that's how our Constitution works.
Thank you for posting this. My mother had a similar condition, where the fetus was so horribly deformed that it would have killed her had she carried it to term. As it was, the abortion almost killed her and she spent a month in hospital recovering.
The worst part was her Christian friends who begged her to forego medical science and trust god to save her and the protesters at the clinic who screamed at her that she would burn in hell. Lovely people.
As for Perry, it will be interesting to see if he gets cancer in a few years like other stem cell recipients. There would be some justice in a man so thoroughly anti-science dying from that ignorance.
So far in the Genetically Modified Foods debate, I've been arguing that, since the genes spliced into GMOs are genes that already exist in nature, GMOs really aren't the nightmarish cancer-causing foodstuffs people make them out to be and that GM foods are the only way we're going to support a population of 7 billion people on this planet just as nitrogen-fixing fertilizer caused a green revolution that allows us to support our current population size.
So what happens when we start splicing genes into organisms that don't exist in nature? When companies start wanting to work this stuff into our food, and the FDA and courts roll over to allow it unquestioningly, then I think I might start to side with the anti GM Food people. This could be a second green revolution, but with America gutting its science programs, there will be no one to make sure this stuff doesn't have horrible health repercussions.
I agree, we do need to start paying it back. That's very different from cutting services to the younger generations who didn't create this debt. The cuts to Social Security they talk about don't apply to the Baby Boomer generation who got us into this mess, the cuts apply to Generation X and everyone who follows them. I say raise taxes on the Baby Boomers and make them clean up their @$%&ing mess before they all retire and leave us with the tab.
I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:
I took this data and plugged it into Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureka and it found a clear warming trend in the data. I'm not statistician, so I was just playing around, but I have yet to see anyone use this data to argue for anything but a warming trend (Note: I have seen skeptics use parts of this data to show short-term cooling trends). My favorite email attacking the results the software gave me was that I had "manipulated" the data by copying-and-pasting it into Excel.
I'm glad more data is being made publicly available, but, like someone else said, that just means it's time for the skeptics to move the goalposts again. Either put up a competing hypothesis that explains the data or shut up.
Also, worth noting, there are hardly any extremist militias left, there are still militias around, but very few of the racist extremist "militias" that were the bogey man of the 90s.
My gut reaction agrees with you. I'm still flipping through the manifesto and a lot of it reads like what you would hear on Rush Limbaugh for the three hours that slime is on the air every day.
This guy wasn't stupid, and his insanity is of a psychopathic nature, not delusional. He killed all those people in a cold calculated stunt for attention. He's very well read, hates Muslims, hates socialism, hates hip-hop, believes in implementing population control on 3rd-world countries, has an extensive understanding of history that is completely biased, and, most of all, extremely Christian. I can easily see this manifesto being picked up by the militias in the United States and secretly admired as a great work. Scary.
In looking for this, I found a Right Wing blog arguing that he was motivated by the belief in Evolution, another blog arguing that he was a liberal Al Queda sypathizer, a liberal blog arguing that he would be a member of the Tea Party if he lived in America and all of them using this 1500 pages of batshit insanity to justify their positions.
Because this document is going to be a political football for weeks to come, can anyone point me to where I can download a copy of this manifesto and see the nonsense for myself instead of having it cherry-picked by every pundit with an ax to grind? I see quotes from it all over the internet, but no link to the primary document.
My wife and I are expecting to test our company next month when we're due to have our first child. She's the senior programmer and many help desk calls get forwarded to her every day and sometimes at 3AM. We've been joking that we're going to have photos of her taking support calls during labor.
In all seriousness, our options aren't good. We always bring our laptops on vacation with us knowing that our adventures might get put on hold to handle support calls. We're a company of five people, so we're stressing over how to handle my wife being out of work for a month of maternity leave. I'd like to have a week to enjoy the new baby, but understand that may not be practical. Luckily, we all telecommute, so when she comes back online we can work from home and take turns with the baby. : )
I feel for the senior IT people I've worked with in the past, who I've had to get out of bed late at night to assist me with something or other, even when they are bed-ridden with the flu.
My pet hypothesis is that Mars was contaminated by Earth millions of years ago. Thinking about it, we have this planet that's down-solar-wind of our planet, catching the microbes whisked away from our upper atmosphere and into outer orbits... like when Earth passes through the remnants of a comet's path, creating meteor showers for hundreds of years afterwards every time we pass through that region of space. There was a story about Russia planning a space probe to Mars' orbit and back, loaded with microbes, to see if any could survive the journey. If any could, then Mars was populated with microbes from our planet a long long time ago.
It does sound like a bill to ensure job security for professional patent trolls, but I'll reserve judgement until I have a chance to read the--oh nevermind.
It could be argued that this was something of a publicity stunt. The song parody was protected free speech. Weird Al didn't have to ask Lady Gaga for permission to satirize her work. He was just being polite.
A recent example of satirical free speech was Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" was sued for infringement of Fox New's trademark "Fair and Balanced" but the court ruled that because Franken's title was a parody of the trademark it was protected free speech.
I love that his album got so much more exposure from the conflict, but let's not forget that parody and satire are constitutionally protected forms of speech. Lady Gaga and the Record Labels lacked a legal foot to stand on in preventing the release of this album.
In Amazon's defense, in my experience the company has done a pretty good job of correcting matters when fraudulent ebooks are put online. I downloaded a $0.99 ebook about, ironically, publishing ebooks, which turned out to be total nonsense. I notified Amazon, the book was delisted, and my account credited. I do get upset when I see public domain books listed for $0.99, when they are just ripped from Project Gutenberg and posted, but again, Amazon seems to do a good job of providing many public domain titles for free as well.
As a self-published author on Amazon, I can say that this seems like an extremely inefficient way to make money. I list my books at $0.99, meaning I have to sell 100 or so of them before I get a $10 royalty check. Self-published books like these don't get as much exposure in the Amazon search engine (I can literally only find my books on Amazon if I search my name). So this seems like spammers taking a whole lot of time and effort to achieve a very tiny payoff, if their efforts don't get them delisted from the site anyway.
But, then again, the same is true of spam emails and spam websites... an obnoxious waste of effort for little payoff, but generates a whole lot of resentment from the online community.
"God Bless You Doctor Kevorkian" is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's book of the same title. In that book Vonnegut, an atheist, explains how at a meeting of the American Humanist Society, after Isaac Asimov's death, he started a speech there with "Isaac Asimov is in heaven now, God rest is soul." which got a huge laugh from the assembly of atheists.
So it's not an actual religious statement, but a semi-farcical one, acknowledging that we atheists do seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to comforting and consoling people over the recently departed. I try to focus on what a miracle it was that we get to experience the wonder of existence at all--statistically speaking. But I was at a complete loss for words when my friend's wife accidentally backed over their son playing in the driveway. What can an spiritual naturalist say to someone when confronted with that? Religion has it easy, they just say the child is in a better place. I don't know what we have... and until we have something, religion wins.
Kevorkian led a long life in service of a greater good. What do you propose we as empiricists, spiritual naturalists, rationalists (call us anything other than the unscientific word "atheist" that defines us in a religious context) say to honor the dead and comfort the living? I'm genuinely curious.
Haekel's specific theory of recapitulation was wrong, but mammals, including humans, do generally recapitulate the physical traits in the order in which they appeared evolutionarily. I'm not sure to what you are referring to with the "Haven't they ever heard of DNA?" remark, but DNA merely provides the guidelines for development which we see adjusting the length of time for certain traits to develop in the womb, not the order of development. For example, the minor DNA differences between humans and chimps makes humans spend more time in the brain development phase, but that phase occurs in the same sequence in both species. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen J. Gould all refer to embryonic recapitulation as a valid hypothesis in their books, but many scientists got scared away from it because Creationists have exploited the fraudulent Haekel drawings. Whether you like it or not, you went from a single cell, to multi-cell, to something that looked like a worm, to something that looked like an amphibian, on up through your evolutionary history... not species by species, but trait by trait.
Nice that the self-proclaimed leader of the intellectual copyright reform movement refused to attend this. I'm sure Doctorow is wasting no time figuring out how to spin Barlow's courage and integrity into something that's his own. Cory Doctorow loves to get out in front of other people's hard work, like Lawrence Lessig's, to push his own image as a intellectual leader, when, in reality, his failure to attend is just more evidence that the man is nothing but a lightweight with a popular blog.
Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars has only seemed moderately science fiction to me. It's more like Dungeons & Dragons with technology filling in for the magic since the technology is never given scientific explanation. The heroes of Star Wars are all archetypal fantasy characters: knights, princesses, rogues, mercenaries, and the obligatory "chosen one." The whole thing romanticizes the Royalty America and France had revolutions to overcome, with its cynical portrayal of the Republic and idealization of the princess. Star Wars' overall take on humanity is cynical, where, despite living in galaxy filled with technology resembling magic, people are just as unenlightened and motivated by baser desires as they are today.
Good science fiction asks questions that pertain to the human condition and every single episode of Star Trek sets out to tackle the hard philosophical questions. Star Trek takes a positive perspective of humanity's future, with upstanding characters who seek intelligent solutions to social and technological dilemmas presented to them. The humans in Star Trek are the role-models for other species. Earth is the center of the Federation of Planets, the center of a working democratic United Nations on a galactic scale, complete with a Prime Directive to prevent a repeat of Earth's colonialist mistakes. Star Trek gets accused of being "Philosopher Kings in Space" or of presenting an idealistic vision of Communism, but these can also be seen as criticisms of the character's intellectualism and their personal virtue of serving the greater good, as academia is called elitist and humanism accused of socialism in today's society. The fact that we can even have such a debate about the sociopolitical dimensions of Star Trek make it a million-bazillion-times more nerdy than Star Wars' blaster and saber show.
Star Wars is fantasy, Star Trek is SF, and I can rant on and on and on about the differences between the two and why SF is vastly superior in every dimension, with the exception of fantasy making better escapist fare for when you want to turn off your brain for a few hours.
That should read "none of them are the missing link". (Hangs head in shame for watching TV while commenting)
What's really neat is that there are now so many dinosaur/bird hybrid fossils that we don't know which one is the direct ancestor of modern birds. There are just too many candidates for the missing link.
The really funny is that the Creationists are spinning the overwhelming abundance of missing links to mean that none of them are missing the link.
Hong Kong is a capitalist community in a communist society.
I was really looking forward to this device when I first heard the rumors, but the problem is that it's 7-inches. I own the current Kindle and it gives me exactly what I need for reading books: a reflective screen that saves energy so I can read off it for a month between chargings. That's all I need for reading text.
What I desperately need is a device I can read my extremely large and growing comic book collection and role-playing game PDFs on. I hate reading these on my laptop and a color touchpad seems like it would be ideal for it, but a seven inch screen is too small. I need a screen that is at least as large as a comic book page and ideally as large as a RPG book page.
I'm not going to buy any touchpad until it meets this requirement, and I'm not buying an iPad period. And I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks a touchpad that's slightly larger than a smartphone is worthless, but these companies keep marketing them to us and declaring "There's not market for Android touchpads" when we don't buy them. Recall Benjamin Franklin's definition of insanity.
The problem isn't that the subsidies were too low, the problem is that "cheap" fuels come at a huge environmental cost that companies don't have to compensate us for. Look at mining companies. They are required by law to clean up the environmental disaster areas they create, filled with acids and toxic chemicals. What do they do when they've finished extracting all the metals and coal from an area? Declare bankruptcy to avoid the clean up costs, and create a new company to destroy the next mining site.
The Corporatists in this country have this skewed idea that clean water, air, and soil have absolutely no value until a corporation lays claim to them, but these natural resources belong to everyone. If corporations were made to compensate us for the damages they inflict on our shared environment, then the true costs of their products would be revealed and green technologies would be able to compete on a level playing field.
This reminds me of my days as an idiot juvenile delinquent, when I would shoplift from stores. Security guards would stop me occasionally, certain that I had been stealing. They would harass me and taunt me, but as long as I didn't open my trench coat, I was safe. They wouldn't dare search me and take the chance that I didn't have stolen goods on me, because they knew I'd slap them and their store with a lawsuit. The law protected a thief like me, but it's larger purpose was to protect the innocent from an invasion of privacy.
Obviously the same principle and consequences apply here. She wasn't the criminal, her privacy was invaded, and she should sue the police department and security company into the ground for damages. They majorly screwed up and this will have implications well beyond this case. It will put a damper on the methods law enforcement can use, but that's how our Constitution works.
Thank you for posting this. My mother had a similar condition, where the fetus was so horribly deformed that it would have killed her had she carried it to term. As it was, the abortion almost killed her and she spent a month in hospital recovering.
The worst part was her Christian friends who begged her to forego medical science and trust god to save her and the protesters at the clinic who screamed at her that she would burn in hell. Lovely people.
As for Perry, it will be interesting to see if he gets cancer in a few years like other stem cell recipients. There would be some justice in a man so thoroughly anti-science dying from that ignorance.
So far in the Genetically Modified Foods debate, I've been arguing that, since the genes spliced into GMOs are genes that already exist in nature, GMOs really aren't the nightmarish cancer-causing foodstuffs people make them out to be and that GM foods are the only way we're going to support a population of 7 billion people on this planet just as nitrogen-fixing fertilizer caused a green revolution that allows us to support our current population size.
So what happens when we start splicing genes into organisms that don't exist in nature? When companies start wanting to work this stuff into our food, and the FDA and courts roll over to allow it unquestioningly, then I think I might start to side with the anti GM Food people. This could be a second green revolution, but with America gutting its science programs, there will be no one to make sure this stuff doesn't have horrible health repercussions.
I agree, we do need to start paying it back. That's very different from cutting services to the younger generations who didn't create this debt. The cuts to Social Security they talk about don't apply to the Baby Boomer generation who got us into this mess, the cuts apply to Generation X and everyone who follows them. I say raise taxes on the Baby Boomers and make them clean up their @$%&ing mess before they all retire and leave us with the tab.
I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:
ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing
Like the article says. Most of this data was already publicly available online:
I took this data and plugged it into Cornell’s free data analysis software Eureka and it found a clear warming trend in the data. I'm not statistician, so I was just playing around, but I have yet to see anyone use this data to argue for anything but a warming trend (Note: I have seen skeptics use parts of this data to show short-term cooling trends). My favorite email attacking the results the software gave me was that I had "manipulated" the data by copying-and-pasting it into Excel.
I'm glad more data is being made publicly available, but, like someone else said, that just means it's time for the skeptics to move the goalposts again. Either put up a competing hypothesis that explains the data or shut up.
Also, worth noting, there are hardly any extremist militias left, there are still militias around, but very few of the racist extremist "militias" that were the bogey man of the 90s.
incorrect
My gut reaction agrees with you. I'm still flipping through the manifesto and a lot of it reads like what you would hear on Rush Limbaugh for the three hours that slime is on the air every day.
This guy wasn't stupid, and his insanity is of a psychopathic nature, not delusional. He killed all those people in a cold calculated stunt for attention. He's very well read, hates Muslims, hates socialism, hates hip-hop, believes in implementing population control on 3rd-world countries, has an extensive understanding of history that is completely biased, and, most of all, extremely Christian. I can easily see this manifesto being picked up by the militias in the United States and secretly admired as a great work. Scary.
Found it. Thanks Wikipedia:
http://www.kevinislaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.pdf
In looking for this, I found a Right Wing blog arguing that he was motivated by the belief in Evolution, another blog arguing that he was a liberal Al Queda sypathizer, a liberal blog arguing that he would be a member of the Tea Party if he lived in America and all of them using this 1500 pages of batshit insanity to justify their positions.
Because this document is going to be a political football for weeks to come, can anyone point me to where I can download a copy of this manifesto and see the nonsense for myself instead of having it cherry-picked by every pundit with an ax to grind? I see quotes from it all over the internet, but no link to the primary document.
My wife and I are expecting to test our company next month when we're due to have our first child. She's the senior programmer and many help desk calls get forwarded to her every day and sometimes at 3AM. We've been joking that we're going to have photos of her taking support calls during labor.
In all seriousness, our options aren't good. We always bring our laptops on vacation with us knowing that our adventures might get put on hold to handle support calls. We're a company of five people, so we're stressing over how to handle my wife being out of work for a month of maternity leave. I'd like to have a week to enjoy the new baby, but understand that may not be practical. Luckily, we all telecommute, so when she comes back online we can work from home and take turns with the baby. : )
I feel for the senior IT people I've worked with in the past, who I've had to get out of bed late at night to assist me with something or other, even when they are bed-ridden with the flu.
My pet hypothesis is that Mars was contaminated by Earth millions of years ago. Thinking about it, we have this planet that's down-solar-wind of our planet, catching the microbes whisked away from our upper atmosphere and into outer orbits... like when Earth passes through the remnants of a comet's path, creating meteor showers for hundreds of years afterwards every time we pass through that region of space. There was a story about Russia planning a space probe to Mars' orbit and back, loaded with microbes, to see if any could survive the journey. If any could, then Mars was populated with microbes from our planet a long long time ago.
...but I drew up a dinky cartoon about Alan Turing's treatment:
Super Science Ninja Squad: Alan Turing
It does sound like a bill to ensure job security for professional patent trolls, but I'll reserve judgement until I have a chance to read the--oh nevermind.
It could be argued that this was something of a publicity stunt. The song parody was protected free speech. Weird Al didn't have to ask Lady Gaga for permission to satirize her work. He was just being polite.
A recent example of satirical free speech was Al Franken's book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" was sued for infringement of Fox New's trademark "Fair and Balanced" but the court ruled that because Franken's title was a parody of the trademark it was protected free speech.
I love that his album got so much more exposure from the conflict, but let's not forget that parody and satire are constitutionally protected forms of speech. Lady Gaga and the Record Labels lacked a legal foot to stand on in preventing the release of this album.
In Amazon's defense, in my experience the company has done a pretty good job of correcting matters when fraudulent ebooks are put online. I downloaded a $0.99 ebook about, ironically, publishing ebooks, which turned out to be total nonsense. I notified Amazon, the book was delisted, and my account credited. I do get upset when I see public domain books listed for $0.99, when they are just ripped from Project Gutenberg and posted, but again, Amazon seems to do a good job of providing many public domain titles for free as well.
As a self-published author on Amazon, I can say that this seems like an extremely inefficient way to make money. I list my books at $0.99, meaning I have to sell 100 or so of them before I get a $10 royalty check. Self-published books like these don't get as much exposure in the Amazon search engine (I can literally only find my books on Amazon if I search my name). So this seems like spammers taking a whole lot of time and effort to achieve a very tiny payoff, if their efforts don't get them delisted from the site anyway.
But, then again, the same is true of spam emails and spam websites... an obnoxious waste of effort for little payoff, but generates a whole lot of resentment from the online community.
"God Bless You Doctor Kevorkian" is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut's book of the same title. In that book Vonnegut, an atheist, explains how at a meeting of the American Humanist Society, after Isaac Asimov's death, he started a speech there with "Isaac Asimov is in heaven now, God rest is soul." which got a huge laugh from the assembly of atheists.
So it's not an actual religious statement, but a semi-farcical one, acknowledging that we atheists do seem to be at a loss for words when it comes to comforting and consoling people over the recently departed. I try to focus on what a miracle it was that we get to experience the wonder of existence at all--statistically speaking. But I was at a complete loss for words when my friend's wife accidentally backed over their son playing in the driveway. What can an spiritual naturalist say to someone when confronted with that? Religion has it easy, they just say the child is in a better place. I don't know what we have... and until we have something, religion wins.
Kevorkian led a long life in service of a greater good. What do you propose we as empiricists, spiritual naturalists, rationalists (call us anything other than the unscientific word "atheist" that defines us in a religious context) say to honor the dead and comfort the living? I'm genuinely curious.
Haekel's specific theory of recapitulation was wrong, but mammals, including humans, do generally recapitulate the physical traits in the order in which they appeared evolutionarily. I'm not sure to what you are referring to with the "Haven't they ever heard of DNA?" remark, but DNA merely provides the guidelines for development which we see adjusting the length of time for certain traits to develop in the womb, not the order of development. For example, the minor DNA differences between humans and chimps makes humans spend more time in the brain development phase, but that phase occurs in the same sequence in both species. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen J. Gould all refer to embryonic recapitulation as a valid hypothesis in their books, but many scientists got scared away from it because Creationists have exploited the fraudulent Haekel drawings. Whether you like it or not, you went from a single cell, to multi-cell, to something that looked like a worm, to something that looked like an amphibian, on up through your evolutionary history... not species by species, but trait by trait.
Nice that the self-proclaimed leader of the intellectual copyright reform movement refused to attend this. I'm sure Doctorow is wasting no time figuring out how to spin Barlow's courage and integrity into something that's his own. Cory Doctorow loves to get out in front of other people's hard work, like Lawrence Lessig's, to push his own image as a intellectual leader, when, in reality, his failure to attend is just more evidence that the man is nothing but a lightweight with a popular blog.