Candid Engineer has a nice post up today concerning the distinction between directly cure-oriented biomedical research and more basic research. The attitude of some of her laboratory colleagues chaps her ass: So what really bakes my noodle is the often dominating opinion within my lab that the only reason we should be doing science is …

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Sara Robinson has a very passionate post up at Orcinus today in which she excoriates right-wing demagogues such as Limbaugh, Beck, and the like for inciting wackaloon racist, misogynist, anti-semitic fuck-up murderers into committing terrorist acts on their fellow citizens. As part of her analysis, she asks the following question: Are you deliberately trying to …

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Is it just me, or has eRA Commons been a fucktillion times slower and frequently down completely since the four-day “maintenance upgrade” a few weeks ago?

UGH!

Does ESPN really have to pollute their baseball broadcasts with Chris Berman? He is a fucking blight. He doesn’t know jack shit about jack fucking shit, and just reads prepared color sheets that some poor fucking unpaid intern prepares for him. Fucking douche.

There is a discussion going on right now over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars concerning what a stupid fuckwit Harry Reid is, and how the fuck someone so fucking stupid and ineffectual could get elected as the leader of the Senate Democratic caucus. The Democratic senatorial caucus elects assholes like Reid as their leader …

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This Associated Press article is entitled Sotomayor’s objectivity on bench is key question, and here are the first two paragraphs: The senator leading the GOP’s review of Sonia Sotomayor said the central question in her Supreme Court nomination should be whether she allows personal views to color her decisions. In the Republican Party’s weekly radio …

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An editorial in this week’s Science describes the report of a committee of medical school and undergraduate faculty convened by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the the Association of American Medical Colleges concerning the undergraduate coursework preparation of medical students. I was struck by this particular conclusion: Medical school faculty have a short time …

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Why is it ZOMFG!DISASTER!!ELEVENTY!11111!!! that Sotomayor’s experiences as a Latina woman might influence her judicial decisionmaking, but it is HUNKY!DORY!TOTES!AWESOME!111!!BAJILLION!!1111! that the experiences as white d00dz of all the fucking white d00dz on the Supreme Court influence theirs? Oh, right. It’s because white d00dz are normal people, and Latina women are exotic illegitimate interlopers. What …

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From the Wall Street Journal: In meetings with senators this week, Sotomayor largely declined to comment except to note her fondness for traditional national favorites, including the New York Yankees baseball team and Nancy Drew mystery novels.