Curse you addictive video games!

Oh good lord, what have I done? Why? Why?!?!

…I bought Sims 3 today.

I played the original Sims back when I was 14 or so, and never got Sims 2 because my computer was too crappy. But now I have a snazzy computer and disposable income, so I thought why not? Now I’m forgetting to eat and sleep because I’m too busy telling a virtual version of myself to eat and sleep. I spent an hour and a half trying to make Sim Jen look as much like me as possible. Hell, there are probably 30 different facial traits and bone structures and crap that you can tweak. Gahhhh.

The ironic part? My current job is “Professional Blogger” and I still can’t get any guys to like me. Damnit, Sims 3. You’re supposed to be an escape from real life, not a brutally honest reflection of it. Oh well, at least I haven’t set fire to my real stove (yet).

I think it’s time to start making Sim versions of celebrities for me to hit on. Suggestions? I kind of want to make a mad scientist PZ as my neighbor. They even have squid themed pajamas!

Atheism & the USSR

One of my commenters, gfish, has an interesting piece up at his blog about atheism and growing up in the USSR. Go check it out. While I’ve lived in the US all my life, I’m also a lifelong atheist – I don’t have some fancy deconversion story about leaving the faith – so I can relate to his post. It’s also interesting seeing the “other side” of the story, since over in the US we get a pretty biased view of what was going on in the USSR religion-wise.

One foot in the closet

People are always talking about atheists being in the closet, a term we stole from the gays for not being publicly honest about how you really are. I feel bad for the people who have to keep their atheism a secret. There are plenty of good reasons to do it – religious friends and family members you don’t want to lose, possible drama at work, living in a small conservative neighborhood, etc. But even if staying closeted is the safer alternative, it still sucks knowing you’re “living a lie.”

I’ve found myself in an odd predicament. I’m basically completely out of the closet except for two people – my grandparents. They go to church every weekend, they take religious holidays seriously, they cross themselves before eating, etc. But my grandparents are by no means bible thumpers or overly zealous; they’re fairly liberal and honestly never really talk about religion. They even know that my parents and I never go to church and that I wasn’t baptized, and that has never really come up in conversation as a problem (at least not in front of me).

However, them knowing I am an atheist is not an option. My mom asserts that it would break their poor 88 year old hearts knowing I didn’t believe in God, and to never ever mention anything about it to them. I have to catch myself to not mention club related stuff, especially since that takes up so much of my time at school. Usually I can get away with being in local newspapers because it won’t get back to them. And the internet isn’t too big of an issue because they have no idea how to use a computer.

Honestly my main fear is that someone who DOES know how to use a computer is going to Google my name one day and tell them about it. I mean, I don’t hide my atheism. I don’t want to hide it. I have an atheist heavy blog, my name is plastered on the Society of Non-Theists website, if you know my email you can probably find a half dozen websites and blogs I comment at. I used to think I was safe since my uncle, the only person who would probably squeal on me if he found out, had no idea how to use a computer. But apparently he’s at Googling level now, so I’m getting a bit worried.

I guess I should be happy it’s just two people I’m hiding from, but it still makes me feel bad that I have this “deep dark secret.” I’d love to be even more active in the atheist community – writing books, doing events that get national news coverage – but I’m too afraid it would trickle back to my grandparents. And the last thing I’d want to do is upset them; they’re honestly the most kind, wonderful people and I love them very much. People have told me that they’re old and to just wait until they pass away, but I think that’s awful. I’d love for them to live to be 120 if they could. I hope beyond hope that they make it to my wedding (whenever that will be, sort of have to find a guy first), but at the same time I know there’s no way I’ll get married in a church or have any mention of God at the ceremony. And that makes me nervous.

Is there anyone else teetering between out and closeted? Desperately trying to hide your atheism from a select few while being out and active everywhere else? Or am I just destined for failure?

Oh old board games

So I went home this weekend to see family and friends. Whenever my friend Mike and I get together, for some unholy reason we play Trivial Pursuit (the most aptly named board game ever). It usually starts off fun, but ends in me throwing pieces after I’ve missed my wedge question for Sports & Leisure or Entertainment for the 15th time. Though this time was special – I couldn’t find our new version of the game, so we had to settle for my parents’ ancient 1981 version. Just to give you some perspective on how hard that is for us, I was born in 1987, Russia was the USSR, and you have to differentiate between East and West Germany.

But what was the worst category? Science and Nature. Usually that’s my go-to subject, but the questions were so ridiculous I had to write some of them down. My four favorites:

Q: What’s the only mammal that can’t fly that can fly?
Me: …Are you kidding me?
A: Man
Mike: That sounds more like a joke than a trivia question.

Q: What sign of the zodiac falls between Nov 22 and Dec 21?
Me: What the hell?!?!?! Why is there an astrology question in SCIENCE and NATURE?!
A: Sagittarius (Unfortunately I knew it anyway, I was a big astrology buff back in the day…I know, we all have our shortcomings)
And then we proceeded to get FIVE MORE astrology questions throughout the game. I can only imagine how many there were total.

Q: Name the three Kingdoms of nature.
Me: Three?? Aren’t there like, five kingdoms? Damnit, old game.
Mike: Well, what are the five?
Me: Um…animals, plants, fungi, protists, and bacteria or whatever. Hm…what three would they say in 1981… I’m going to say Animals, plants, and bacteria.
A: Animal, vegetable, mineral
Me: What the hell?! Mineral isn’t even a living thing! (And upon further inspection, the five kingdoms were developed in 1969, so screw you Trivial Pursuit)

Q: What’s considered the most highly specialized mammal?
Me: …Well technically each mammal is highly specialized for the particular niche it evolved in. What the hell is this even asking?
A: The whale
Me: I hate this game

In conclusion, don’t play old versions of Trivial Pursuit unless you want to be frustrated, or you want a unique outlook on how far we’ve come in science in the last 30 years. Or you want to watch your scientist friends throw mini tantrums.

Judge refuses to dismiss National Day of Prayer case

From AP (short enough that I’ll just copy and paste the whole thing):

“MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A federal judge has refused to dismiss a lawsuit that claims the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb ruled this week the case brought by the Madison-based Freedom From Religion Foundation can move forward with discovery.

A federal law sets the first Thursday in May as the day for presidents to issue proclamations asking Americans to pray.

Crabb says the nation’s largest group of atheists and agnostics faces a heavy burden in proving the tradition violates the separation of church and state. But she says it should have an opportunity to do so.

The Obama administration and National Day of Prayer Task Force filed motions to dismiss the case, but Crabb rejected them as premature.”

Great to see that a judge is at least willing to hear the case. We obviously haven’t won anything yet, but it’s a first step. I don’t see how you could possibly interpret a federal law proclaming a day of prayer as constitutional. It scares me a bit that the Obama administration was one of the groups trying to dismiss the case. Anyone know anything more about that? If that’s true, shame on you, Obama administration. They keep doing more and more stuf that makes me uneasy…

Human FOXP2 in Chimps – Ethical or not?

Jerry Coyne, one of my favorite evolutionary biologists who blogs over at Why Evolution is True, talked about the mouse FOXP2 experiment I mentioned the other day. He definitely took a bit of the wind out of my sails, since I had gotten pretty excited, but he’s probably more realistic than I am about this thing. However, one thing got to me:

“Of course the definitive experiment, swapping a human or chimp gene with the copy from the other species, and observing the result, is unethical.”

Noooooo! There goes my experiment.

But seriously. Forgive me if I’m just being a naive young scientist – I am but a lowly undergrad – but why would one argue that doing this experiment with a chimp would be unethical? He states it like it’s such an obvious black and white issue – “Of course” it’s unethical. But I would be more inclined to view it as a gray area. It’s highly unlikely we’d create apes who run around speaking French ala Michael Crichton’s Next. Many more genes than FOXP2 control the various brain and throat structures associated with human speech for us to see this happen.

Do we just have some special connection with chimps because they’re our cousins? If so it seems like we’re applying the Scala Naturae to our ideas of what’s okay to experiment on and what’s not (one of my big pet peeves). Fruit flies and mice are just lowly creatures, but a chimpanzee is too close to the “perfection” of humans to fiddle with. I know we experiement on chimpanzees – but why are those studies okay, yet this one wouldn’t be?

I’m not necessarily defending my half-joking experiment of sticking FOXP2 in chimps and seeing what happens. I’m just honestly curious what people think and the reasoning behind these ethics. There’s no “Ethics in Science 101” class we’re all required to take (though there should be), so I love talking about this kind of stuff. What do you think? Is putting the human gene for “speech” into chimpanzees going too far? Where do we draw the line?

Evolving Robot Behavior

Yet another reason why science is freaking amazing. Swiss scientists have a population of robots, and they’re watching their behavior evolve. Each robot had LEDs and photodetectors, and its habitat consists of battery-charging “food” zones, and battery-draining “poison” zones. Their programming is initially random, and after they’ve traveled around their habitat a certain amount of time, the scientists turn them off and select the robots with the highest battery life. The programming from these robots gets combined and is used in the next generation.

Repeated enough times, and you start seeing trends. The robots “learn” to approach the food and stay away from the poison. Not only that, but you see the emergence of cheaters and helpers. Cheaters lure robots to the poison, only to go eat the food now that the other robots are busy being poisoned. And the helpers go stand by the poison and warn other robots with their blinky lights to not come near it.

How freaking cool is that? I for one welcome our new robot overlords. I just hope the equilibrium frequency for cheaters stays low.

Mice given human speech gene

Man, science is so cool. Stuff like this is why I’m a geneticist. The FOXP2 gene is considered the “language gene” in humans. People who have nonfunctional versions of the gene have a hard time controlling the fine movements in the face needed for forming words, and their areas of the brain associated with language are less active. FOXP2 is found throughout the animal kingdom and is associated with vocalization and song learning. It is also highly conserved – except in humans. While mice and chimpanzees have the same version of the gene, humans have two non synonymous mutations – that is, two different amino acids.

So what did these scientists do? They stuck the human version of FOXP2 into mice to see what would happen. No, the mice didn’t start talking like Mickey, but they showed changes in brain structure that is associated with human speech and had different ultrasonic vocalizations. Unfortunately we’re not fluent in Mouseish, so we don’t know if these mouse pups are suddenly speaking at a Shakespearean level, but it’s still pretty neat.

This is especially exciting because we kept coming back to this topic in my Eukaryotic genetics class. Our professor was telling us the above information about FOXP2. “What if you put a human FOXP2 in a chimpanzee?” a student asked. “I wonder what would happen.” Half of the class’s eyes twinkled with mad scientist glee (the half that will be researchers, not med students I assume). Our professor sort of laughed nervously. “I don’t know, have fun getting an ethics committee to accept that.” I turned to one of my friends and mouthed, presumably with an evil grin, “I’m gonna do it!!” and it turned into a running joke for the class. She’s the one who sent me the article. We haven’t been scooped quite yet, but almost!! I better get crackin’ on my talking chimp.

Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology

People using IP addressed owned by the Church of Scientology will no longer be able to edit Wikipedia articles. Apparently members of the church have kept trying to edit articles to be pro-Scientology, which goes against Wikipedia’s neutrality rules.

Ha.

Seriously though, Scientology creeps me out big time. It’s scary how much they try to control and censor anyone talking about their organization. People like to point out how it’s just a cult, but really, it’s not that much different than other religions – they’re just cults that have somehow become socially acceptable. Hopefully Scientology never reaches that point, but you never know…

And Japan fills in for Jennifer

I’m lacking inspiration at the moment – sorry folks. I’d like to blame the drugs, but I’m done with them and actually feeling great. I’m going home for the weekend, so maybe driving through rural Indiana will inspire me. Until then here are some videos from Japan that scare me and make me laugh at the same time: