Have a jolly godless Christmas, all!

Albert Mohler never disappoints. If you want a peek at the smug, ignorant heart of modern American Christianity, the weekly columns of the president of the Souther Baptist Theological Seminary are good places to start. In his latest effort, he expresses surprise that atheists might enjoy the Christmas holidays. He’s positively baffled that Richard Dawkins admits sharing in the traditions of his culture.

The thought of Richard Dawkins singing any carols with explicit Christian content is difficult to hold — unless the Oxford professor intends to sing of a faith he does not profess.

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You mean I-35 doesn’t dispense magical cures?

Remember that bizarre video from Pat Robertson that claimed I-35 was a holy highway? One element featured there was a cheerful (ex-?)gay man who claimed to have been “cured” in one of the Purity Sieges the Christians put on.

It turns out that the story wasn’t quite as beautiful as it was portrayed. The fellow was bipolar, was deprived of his medicine, put through a hellish harrowing instead of treatment, and was eventually kicked out of the “gay cure” program as a failure. The poor guy was simply manipulated for propaganda purposes by these Christianist fanatics.

Ha-haa, England!

All you Brits who pointed and laughed at our village idiot who built a major Creation “Museum” in Kentucky are going to get your comeuppance: Lancashire is about to get a “giant Christian theme park that will champion the book of Genesis and make a multi-media case that God created the world in seven days.”

We’re pointing and laughing ourselves now, but I assure you — we also feel your pain, and there are tears in our eyes.

Padian interview

If you’ve got an hour free, this interview with Kevin Padian is a pleasant listen. The interviewer is a bit of a bore, but Padian is always an intelligent conversationalist — I’d like to have seen a more aggressive counter to some of the silly stuff brought up by the interviewer, but this was not an antagonistic situation so I can also see why the discussion goes in the direction it does. There were a lot of places where I would have said, “Padian is exactly right, but…” — but then I think I’m just intrinsically crankier.

Well, there is a part about halfway through where he says the role of chance is negligible that I would take strong exception to…

Are we tired of Texas inanity yet?

Many people have been sending me this story about Texas considering accrediting the Institute of Creation Research for training teachers, and I’ve just been reluctant to mention it because poor Texas has been getting walloped over creationism lately, and I was feeling a terrible sympathy for the place. It’s as if the whole state has fallen into a pit of suck.

The ICR wants to offer Masters degrees in science education, of all things; they claim they’d be offering instruction in evolution alongside their science curriculum, but we know that is a lie, since the people at ICR aren’t competent to offer kindergarten level courses in pretty, pretty baby animals, let alone real biology. A state advisory board, in a fit of ignorance and insanity, has approved this plan, but it next has to go before the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for final approval.

I hope Texas scientists can slap that Board into wakeful reality before that meeting, because if this goes through, the trust I can give Texas-trained teachers is getting flushed right down the sewer. And if Texans can’t fix this, the rest of the country has to step up and deny certification to anyone trained in Texas — their diplomas and degrees will be worth about as much as Monopoly money.

Sorry, Texas. It’s just getting to be a bit much.

Load-bearing adaptation of women’s spines

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Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Those of you who have been pregnant, or have been a partner to someone who has been pregnant, are familiar with one among many common consequences: lower back pain. It’s not surprising—pregnant women are carrying this low-slung 7kg (15lb) weight, and the closest we males can come to the experience would be pressing a bowling ball to our bellybutton and hauling it around with us everywhere we go. This is the kind of load that can put someone seriously out of balance, and one way we compensate for a forward-projecting load is to increase the curvature of our spines (especially the lumbar spine, or lower back), and throw our shoulders back to move our center of mass (COM) back.

Here’s the interesting part: women have changed the shape of individual vertebrae to better enable maintenance of this increased curvature, called lordosis, and fossil australopithecines show a similar variation.

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A Weird Seizure Drug

A friend of mine, who’s name won’t be mentioned, blacked out in class the other day. Since then, he’s been on a seizure drug. The drug is giving a very weird side effect. It must be affecting his auditory cortex, because he is hearing all audio roughly a half-octave lower than what it really is. In fact, he’s using a sound editing program to raise his entire music library up the ~half-octave to compensate. The name of the drug is Tegretol. In the midst of headaches over finals, I’ll see if I can find any interesting papers on it.