Keith du Cros.com

Been awhile since a post… Picked this up from digg today.

Not bad acting for kids!

NewScientist has covered a survey/study on how evolution is taught in the classroom (or, sometimes, how its not). Of the 2000 teachers polled, 16% followed creationism, believing that the earth had been created by god within the past 10,000 years. Whats probably more significant is the effects…

[..] about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a “valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species”

[..] Teachers who subscribed to these young-Earth creationist views, perhaps not surprisingly, spent 35% fewer hours teaching evolution than other teachers

Not entirely suprising how America gets statistics like this, now, is it.

This is the best thing I’ve seen the internet produce in weeks. Stuff God Hates. Written by no other than the almighty himself. The most notable items of the list being Africa, Hillary Clinton, Science, Dancing, Cats, and Asia… Just don’t try and correct his spelling. For the lord is infallible…

He’s even made contact with PZ Myers!

Thought the blog was getting a bit weighed down with seriousness… Another Extras clip worth watching is Ian McKellan if you haven’t already.

I’ve finally joined the twitter crowd (See the twitter ‘widget’ to the right). Got to say I’m fairly impressed. Its great to find a site that specialises in something, for once. Too many services try to be the be-all of websites - but twitter knows what it does, it does it simply, and it does it well. Nice for a change. Typical of Ruby on Rails applications (even though they’re supposedly switching soon). I see myself using twitter a lot in the future.

Thought this was pretty amazing. I’ve seen the clip of the crows using the traffic lights before, but this is something else. Really fascinating.

P.S: I’m really sick of video sites that don’t make it easy to embed videos using SWFObject. Flashvars are awful -_- … Now everyone on IE gets the stupid Eolas flash prompt… Other bloggers will know what I mean…

Picked this up from a NewScientist article.

Ground-living vertebrates have declined by 25%, with most of the slump occurring since 1980. Marine species held fairly steady until the late 1990s before falling sharply to give an overall drop of 28%. Freshwater species have decreased by 25%, primarily since the late 1980s.

Loh says the most dramatic declines have been observed in the tropics. Tropical ground-living species have seen an average population drop of 46%, while their temperate cousins have shown no overall change.

They don’t seem to be 100% sure on the numbers, but they could possibly even be conservative.

Based on the popular Japanese manga created by Akira Toriyama, whose work spawned best selling graphic novels, video games and a phenomenally successful television series, Dragonball centers on the heroic Goku, a powerful warrior who protects the Earth from an endless stream of rogues bent on dominating the Universe and controlling the mystical objects from which the film takes its name.

Yes thats right. If your brain hasn’t exploded just yet.. Go here. Now. Look. There is a real life Dragon Ball Z movie in the works. It actually looks really nasty - but the insanity behind it being done is still just too much to bear.

Simple post with some parenting inspiration for any mum or dad. Even if you’re not a parent, you must watch this video.