Aren’t fathers supposed to love their daughters?

Daughters (and sons) have a special property: normal people simply can’t kill them. They drive us crazy, they can break our hearts, but we just can’t do them harm ourselves.

So I really don’t understand how a father can kill his daughter over her clothing choices. I can yell, and I could ground her, and I could deprive her of privileges…but physically hurt her? Impossible.

Oh. It was over religious apparel. That explains everything. Religion is very good at subverting and destroying normal, healthy family values.

What would Admiral Ackbar say?

Steve King (Rotten-Iowa) has our house of representatives pondering a resolution that states that Christmas is peachy-keen…and that also contains implicit assumptions that the US is a Christian nation. It’s very devious: under the cover of empty, feel-good fluff, it advances right-wing religious talking points. It’s sneaky. It’s underhanded. It’s dishonest. It’s so Christian.

Schrödinger abuse

I’m feeling left out. The mathematicians — Mark, Blake, and Tyler — are having so much fun bullseyeing a certain womp rat over there in Creationist Canyon. Yeah, Slimy Sal Cordova has poked his pointy head up and claimed that, somehow, Intelligent Design and Advanced Creation Science (whatever the heck that is) are built on Fourier transforms and Schrödinger’s equation. It’s a pathetic spectacle — Cordova simply throws up a formula with some Greek symbols in it, waves his hand with a flourish, and says, “A-ha!” After a time of his readers staring blankly at him, he says, “A-ha!” again, expecting us to now absorb what he has said spontaneously. And then people who know what they’re doing laugh at his pretense.

I am not a mathematician, but once upon a time I did discuss Fourier transforms in biology, and while I can’t claim to have offered a high-level mathematical discourse on the subject, I did at least try to explain what I was talking about. Cordova’s got nothin’.

(By the way, if you’re interested in playing with Fourier imaging, the wonderful free image processing and analysis program from NIH, ImageJ, lets you do all kinds of fun stuff with images, including an FFT and inverse FFT.)

Aaaaahhh.

Classes aren’t quite over, but I gave my last lecture for the fall 2007 semester today. I still have a discussion session, a lab, and an exam to give, but it’s still something of a landmark in the trajectory of the term. No more lecture prep! No more daily theatrical performances! What’s left is more like friendly conversation and accounting.

I have this six-pack of homebrew from Dave Puskala waiting for me in the refrigerator at home…I’m opening one tonight.

Another holiday effort from a group of atheists

A number of readers were peeved at the Connecticut Valley Atheists’ choice of a holiday display — I was not, and I applauded their assertiveness. So what do you think of the Chester County Atheists’ display?

The group’s display, “The Tree of Knowledge,” will include a 15-foot evergreen with color copies of book covers as decorations. Some of the book covers will include the Holy Bible, the Quran, “Ethics Without God,” “Why I Am Not a Christian,” and “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.”

Better? Personally, I would have left off the first two listed since they’re actually more a source of ignorance than knowledge, but you can’t fault the group for trying to be inclusive and conciliatory. These are the “make nice” atheists who are the only ones some readers approve of…but look what it gets them.

Fox News had a program on the display, pitting Margaret Downey against some wanker, Father Jonathan Morris. They called it an “outrage”. Father Jonathan was practically gibbering into his tea at the thought that atheists would have the temerity to speak up, even in such a consciously inoffensive way.

Father Jonathan’s comments were frequently interrupted by Downey, but he appeared to be trying to make the point that he supports free speech but feels that Downey’s group should have had the delicacy to refrain from exercising it.

…

“So many people who I work with on a daily basis, who are really struggling with faith, look and say, ‘You know what? I’m embarrassed,'” said Morris. “Because you’re an atheist, you’re trying to say therefore we’re going to sabotage what is a holiday, a religious holiday.”

I’m afraid that when people whine at me that we need to be more sensitive to those pious beliefs, when I’m told that atheists must be more tasteful, unaggressive, and quiet, I know what an exercise in futility that is — our very existence is offensive to some, and just the fact that we’re living in freedom is an affront to the religious right. You can’t win by accepting their rules and surrendering, so you might as well raise a ruckus and offend, offend, offend. And do it proudly.

I like their “Tree of Knowledge” idea. But now, if I were to do something like that, I definitely wouldn’t include any of their “holy” books. Being positive is good, compromising on principle is not.

The things you learn about us godless evilutionists…

Who knew we were so wicked? Slimy Sal Cordova thinks that being
sodomized by horses is concomitant with “Darwinism”, and Joe Blundo claims The Golden Compass is superfluous as a recruiting tool for atheists because we have the video game Grand Theft Auto, some stupid sitcom called Two and a Half Men, slasher movies, Girls Gone Wild videos.
I had no idea these were the rites of my ideology.

I’ve never played Grand Theft Auto, I might have seen ten minutes of that sitcom once before turning it off, I dislike slasher movies, and not only haven’t I seen Girls Gone Wild, I think the whole concept is contemptible and exploitive. Oh, and I’ve never had sex with any animal unless they’re members of my species.

I guess I’m a very, very bad atheist.

[Student Post] What i lerned in skool today part deux.

WARNING. What follows is a a bit of a rant. Worse, it’s an undergraduate rant. If awkward phrases, fallacious arguments and poor grammar offends you, I would suggest skipping this post.

It could be that I’m seeing the world through cobalt-colored glasses– it is winter in MN and very cold and dark– and it is highly probable that the onslaught of medical school rejection letters biases me, but I think today was the most depressing day of school I’ve had in recent history.

It started with neurobiology (Ok…this one’s a bit of a stretch) when we learned about the development of nervous tissue and how progenitor cells literally compete via lateral inhibition with each other to see who will become what. Neuroectoderm cells that “lose” become dispensable support cells while the ones that “win” are lavished with ‘cytoplasmic gifts’ (PZ’s words) and differentiate into a neuroblasts. I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, our very cells viciously jockey to establish hierarchies!?” I mean… who wants to be the little peon cell? They lied to us in kindergarden…

Next came ecology. This was a killer. The professor even had a disclaimer before lecture warning us that what would ensue would be upleasant. Yep. It was the global warming lecture. I had seen the “hockey stick” graphs before and the receding glacier pictures and yes, they’re all very disturbing, but what really got me was a picture of the arctic circle in the summer. There appeared to be about half of the ice cover that usually persisted pre-industrial revolution.

Things got worse in ecology lab. We had to calculate our carbon footprint. Apparently I use about 24 acres to support my lifestyle. It would take 4 earths for everyone to live like me (and I didn’t even count this l’il methane producer):
i-b85428f459789e03342dab62f21dcbe9-s13909083_17655930_5438.jpg
…or these guys…
i-112bd0c1e2cb1efd7af8c580a373e889-bunnies.jpg

The final blow was a film screening for my class on human aggression. The movie? Natural Born Killers. It was a double whammy. Even if the self-destructing, unsavory, hopeless nature of the characters doesn’t get to you than the indictment of society’s commodification of violence certainly does.

Man. Days like today almost make me yearn for the good ol’ days when I had my class on” critical pedagogy” with excerpts from Paulo Freire on the necrophilic and dehumanizing nature of oppression.

I… think I need to go hold one of the bunnies…

Colorado killer identified

We can all breathe a sigh of relief. The gunman who killed four people at evangelical churces in Colorado was not a buddhist atheist Jew evilutionist. He was a deranged disgruntled former member.

The gunman believed to have killed four people at a megachurch and a missionary training school had been thrown out of the school about three years ago and had been sending hate mail to the program, police said in court papers Monday.

The gunman was identified as Matthew Murray, 24, who was home-schooled by his family and raised in what a friend said was a deeply religious Christian household. Murray’s father is a neurologist and a prominent multiple-sclerosis researcher.

I suppose they could blame it all on the fact his father was a scientist, still.