Scott Westerfeld pointed out this, um, disturbing CNN headline.

Cheney to be in charge during Bush colonoscopy. Truly, is there nothing this man cannot do?

A great post about “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y-chromosome Adam” by Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority…

When it comes to Adam and Eve, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I can unequivocally state that they never got divorced. The bad news is that they never married. That’s understandable, of course, since Eve died more than 50,000 years before Adam was born.

Martin Rundqvist of Aardvarcheology has collected a great carnival of archeological sites in local communities. I was going to write a piece about the Aboriginal middens around here but didn’t get to it in time. Anyways, it’s worth a visit but while I was there my interest was piqued by Martin’s recommendation of a book and I wanted to respond.

The book is Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1 which Martin describes as, “Level-headed, clearly written, unromantic, painstaking with its sources, humanistic in its values.”

Now I’m going to disagree with Martin here, but I’ll give him a pass because (i) he lives in Sweden and is therefore a long way from Australia and would not have easy access to the resources to know what’s wrong with Windschuttle’s work, and (ii) Windschuttle is a compellingly clear and articulate writer and conveys his arguments with a great deal of forcefulness, and (iii) whatever the limitations of Windschuttle’s arguments, he has been instrumental in forcing Australian historians to a higher level of scholarship.

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Bruce Gillespie has released Steam Engine Time #6 into the wild (dialup warning: 2.7M pdf file).

Contents include Ditmar on fractal spaces and cosmology, a roundtable summary plus responses on the history of “hard” SF (thereby distilling about 100,000 con panels into a few pages of light reading), and among many other communications, a touching letter by Greg Egan.

Evolutionary psychology. It is one of the most fascinating fields in science right now. I love it. I also hate it because it lends itself to terrible articles like “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Allan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today. I know, I know. It’s only Psychology Today, not a proper journal. Psychology Today is to research psychology what Model Aircraft Monthly is to aerodynamic engineering. But, you know, it presents itself like a journal for professionals, and this particular article managed to get itself listed on the estimable Arts & Letters Daily with the promise that it reveals “strange truths of human nature…” which would be wonderful if only it contained a high proportion of either strangeness or truth.

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Maureen McHugh charts the psychology of the novel in progress.

No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears.

Ursula K. LeGuin, in the latest Ansible, makes her point with considerable panache.