RCimT: Turkey-day minimal-effort-post day!

There’s a lull in the action in the turkey-day activities at the moment, so I’m going to try to get out a second Random Crap in my Tabs post for your edification. Enjoy!

Obama’s own reaction to getting the Nobel Peace Prize is telling — more telling, at least, than everyone right- and left-wing losing their shit over it.

Here’s an interesting post suggesting that Obama actually does already deserve the Nobel Peace prize, even though he’s still only eight months into his term and having delivered few of his promises as yet. The gist of this post is that he’s been making great strides toward using *actual* diplomacy, instead of the cowboy diplomacy that’s been the policy of the prior eight years.

In a small bit of justice, there will be fraud charges laid against the asshat that prescribed herbal “cures” for someone already undergoing science-based cancer treatment, after said patient quit the proper treatment and then died. He’s being charged for bilking 55 families out of $1.1 Mil. Frankly, bringing him up on only fraud charges is insufficient — how many of those families had members die as a result of deferring proper medical treatment?

This is an awesome idea — a grade-school biology teacher set up a blog for her students, and is not only encouraging class-wide participation, but seeing phenomenal results, attracting attention by proper scientists as well as their peers.

Leonard Nimoy appears to have officially passed the Star Trek baton to the next generation with some finality this time around. This is good. Now Nimoy will be able to properly enjoy his twilight years with the knowledge that the Star Trek universe and his character especially, is in good hands.

Greg Laden has a fascinating introspective about the bullies he had to grow up with, their formative effects on his childhood, and the racism he’s experienced as a whole.

On BoingBoing: A young-adult sci-fi book based on steampunk and genetic engineering? Sign me up right f’n now! Also, the super-skinny photoshop fail that is Ralph Lauren’s latest ad campaign, and Carl Sagan on pot.

I’ll admit, that last link redoubles my Sagan hero worship. As does this story by a pizza guy who drank some glenfiddig with Sagan one dark winter’s night in Ithaca.

Bill O’Reilly had Richard Dawkins on recently, managing to avoid talking about Dawkins’ book at all. He preferred instead to describe how he’s “throwing in with Jesus” rather than accepting that science’s self-correcting mechanisms means it doesn’t a priori have all the answers. Why find out how the universe actually works one brick at a time, when you can just accept the teachings of some bronze-age tribes instead?

There’s probably even more stuff I could throw onto this post, but that’ll do for now. Possibly another one later!