No teabagging for me

It’s a question that makes it hard to suppress a giggle: how many of you are going to be teabagging today?

I think it’s awesome that this last desperate gasp of the far right wing to achieve political relevance got tagged with such an appropriately ridiculous moniker. The demented duo of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have made me laugh for the first and probably only time.

It is getting a little old watching the more culturally conscious members of the media making fun of the clueless wingnuts, though. This is just too easy.

(via Sullivan)

These things come in waves

I wonder what’s behind the somewhat cyclic nature of internet phenomena? I’m getting a lot of messages from people telling me about this discovery that cephalopods have venom—I covered that a few weeks ago. I’m also being told that I’m in an amusing rap video…that one I mentioned over a year ago. I’m not about to discourage anyone from sending me links, I’m simply curious about the strange way I’ll suddenly got lots of links to the same thing all at once.

Make Fort Wayne look like a much more rational place

Fort Wayne, Indiana wants to know about your religion, and they have chosen the highly scientific method of … an internet poll. And you know what those are worth!

Question: Do you identify with some form of the Christian religion?

Yes, and my faith is important to me. 62%
No. I’m religious but in a personal way. 10%
No. I’m of another faith. 1%
No. I’m an atheist or agnostic. 27%

Well, they asked. Let ’em know what the answer is.

Basics: Imprinting

I’ve been busy — I’m teaching genetics this term, and usually the first two thirds of the course is trivial to prepare for — we’re covering Mendelian genetics, and the early stuff is material the students have seen before and are at least generally familiar with the concepts, and all I have to do is cover them a little deeper and with a stronger quantitative component. That’s relatively easy.

The last part of the course, though, is where we start moving into uncharted waters for them, and every year I have to rethink how I’m going to cover the non-Mendelian concepts, and sometimes my ideas work well, and sometimes they don’t. If I teach it for another 20 years, I’ll eventually reach the point where every lecture has been honed into a comprehensible ideal. At least that’s my dream.

Anyway, one of the subjects we’re covering in the next lecture or two is imprinting, and I know from past experience that this can cause mental meltdowns in my students. This makes no sense if you’re used to thinking in Punnett squares! So I’ve been reworking this little corner of the class, and as long as I’m putting together a ground-up tutorial on the subject, I thought I might as well put it on the web. So here you are, a basic introduction to imprinting.

[Read more…]

What’s John Holbo doing now?

Those squishy softies on the non-science side of campus…they can do anything, apparently. Holbo is playing with the creation of an illustrated children’s book for adults, called Squid & Owl. Obviously, it’s got owls and squid in it, and compares them frequently, with an interesting graphic style.

I had a moment’s worry when I saw this page, though.

i-9e5fdf8189a53424aab97a0b4f3ff91f-squidowl.jpeg

I thought the answer was obvious — developmental and molecular biology — and was worried that he was about to horn into my turf, but fortunately he takes another tack altogether.