Dog bites man

You know, I don't even have much to say about President Bush taking the "teach the controversy" position on Intelligent Design creationism, because it's such an unsurprising item. I doubt Bush actually gives a crap about this issue, and if he'd said anything different, his base would be enraged; the fact is that the position he's endorsing has broad support from a completely hoodwinked public. After all, it sounds completely reasonable as long as you believe that there is a genuine scientific controversy here instead of a trumped-up political controversy.

As many others have said, you could probably use "teaching the controversy" in the classroom as a jumping-off point for making lots of interesting points about evolution, as talkorigins.org does so well. Were I a high-school biology teacher, I'd be strongly tempted to do it. But of course that's not what ID proponents actually want, or what they're really asking for, since it would amount to trashing their arguments; if they can't control the debate entirely, they want equal advocacy.

Close enough to outer space

My friend Phil Wherry told me about this excellent project of the Vienna (Virginia) Wireless Society in which they sent a balloon up to 98,000 feet (about 30 km) from Front Royal, with radio telemetry and a couple of digital cameras taking pictures. The sky gets awfully black up there and you can see clear across Chesapeake Bay.

The balloon then popped and the payload apparently fell into a tree in Orange County, Virginia southeast of Culpeper (by parachute, I think), with at least one of the cameras still running.