It’s Seuss’s birthday! So what’s your favorite? Mine’s easy.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The grand jury report on the Catholic sexual abuses in Altoona-Johnstown is available for reading, and I’m sorry, it’s practically pornographic. What these people were doing to the children of their community, with the compliance of the police who turned a blind eye to their behavior, is obscene.
In 1971, Father John Boyle groped the genitals of a 15-year-old boy in the basement of St. Edward’s Church in Barnesboro, Pennsylvania on numerous occasions. Boyle also kissed the boy and performed oral sex on him. The boy was confused. He could tast the alcohol on Father Boyle’s mouth. He concluded that what was happening to him must be what the Church called the “mystery of the Church and Priesthood.”
It goes on and on like that for 145 pages. I could not bear to read much of it. But it’s clear that the diocese was knowingly shuffling pedophile priests around, doing nothing about them, and basically enabling the rape of children for decades.
They even had a pay-out schedule for offenses when they were caught at it!
That’s a lot of money. It’s telling that the church hierarchy was willing to fork over that kind of cash rather than actually punishing and stopping their bad priests — and that tells you the whole thing was rotten, root and branch.
PlosOne has published an article on the Biomechanical Characteristics of Hand Coordination in Grasping Activities of Daily Living. There’s nothing wrong with the data that I can see, but the authors do make a surprising leap in the abstract and conclusion.
In conclusion, our study can improve the understanding of the human hand and confirm that the mechanical architecture is the proper design by the Creator for dexterous performance of numerous functions following the evolutionary remodeling of the ancestral hand for millions of years. Moreover, functional explanations for the mechanical architecture of the muscular-articular connection of the human hand can also aid in developing multifunctional robotic hands by designing them with similar basic architecture.
The paper is a technical structure and function analysis of the bones and muscles of the human hand. There’s nothing in the paper that probes the creator
for their intent and goals of proper design
, or that assesses the the hypothesis of design
vs. evolution — in fact, they seem to want to have it both ways, ascribing its functional adaptedness to both.
The authors are from the Institute of Rehabilitation and Medical Robotics, State Key Lab of Digital Manufacturing Equipment and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. Engineers. Somehow, I am not surprised.
But be prepared: this is the kind of thing creationists love to cite, and I expect it will make it to the Discovery Institute’s list of ID-friendly scientific publications. Just note that it says nothing to support the god hypothesis at all.
I did like one of the comments there.
Humans occasionally use their hand as a tool of masturbation, one of “a multitude of daily tasks” performed “in a comfortable way”.
Clearly, the divine purpose of the human hand is masturbation. I look forward to their analysis of the proper design by the Creator of the human tongue. Unfortunately, all the evidence says the human penis was a botched design, as the development of multifunctional robotic penises has completely abandoned the original inspiration and seems to be pursuing an evolutionary path rooted in the Hitachi Magic Wand.
Sometimes it seems that way. The latest example comes from the College of Saint Rose, where the president, Carolyn Stefanco, has won an award. What great accomplishment deserved recognition?
Stefanco, the president of Saint Rose, received the award two months after announcing the elimination of 23 faculty positions — many of them tenured — and 12 academic programs. She pitched the cuts, part of an attempt to fix a $9 million deficit, as a way to save money while investing in the college’s more popular programs.
Oh. “Popular” programs. I’m in one of those! Good thing I don’t have to worry about biology being shuttered, and it’s that other side of campus that’s more at risk. Who needs foreign languages, for instance? Or in another trend I see a lot of, let’s bugger philosophy. What a joke major
! Don’t you know the purpose of college is to get a high paying job
, to cite a recent exchange.
The award was for being a “disruptor”. It comes from…business. Of course.
“Disrupter,” a word native to start-up culture, typically describes someone who balks at conventional wisdom and comes out ahead. A disrupter discovers newer, better ways to run businesses and manipulate industries.
“To flourish in business these days is to make disruption and change work for you and your business,” Mike Hendricks, editor-in-chief of the Review, wrote when the paper announced the winners. “You have to recognize the need and opportunity for change and risk the status quo.”
We do need better ways to support higher education — I think faculty would welcome innovators who could shake up the status quo, because we’re getting worried. The problem is that a university is not a business, and our goal isn’t to make money — it’s to teach and learn. Coming in and disrupting education to make more money kind of ignores the whole function of the institution. It would be as if a business hired me, an academic, to “disrupt” their status quo, and I declared that I was going to “disrupt” that whole crap about profits and economics and instead redefine their purpose to be all about giving their expertise to the community. I don’t think it would go over well with the stockholders.
Unfortunately, the people who’ve been handed the reins of our universities are too often sitting their with a stockholder mentality.
Unsurprisingly, the faculty had a no-confidence vote on Stefanco. Also unsurprisingly, the board of trustees affirmed their confidence in her.
Just got back from the caucus — the turnout was YUUUUGE. Long lines snaking into the meeting place, crowds of people everywhere. We voted and left instead of staying for all the politicking just because it was standing room only and we felt we had to leave to give more people a chance to come in.
Now we just wait for the returns.
You should watch the election returns on the Guardian. Not so much for the quality coverage, but for the mesmerizing little cartoon candidates zipping back and forth to paint in the county results.
Simon Newman, the university president who said This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies…put a Glock to their heads,
has resigned.
This is what happens when you hire somebody to run a university who has no competency to do so.
Mr. Newman has almost 30 years of experience working as an executive with a strong background in private equity, strategy consulting, and operations. He is the former managing director of the private equity fund JP Capital Partners, as well as president and CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, founded in 1997.
During his career he has started or co-founded four different businesses, completed more than $33 billion in transactions, and raised more than $3 billion in equity funding for ventures and bids he originated. He has led several business turnarounds and delivered more than $200 million in profit improvements.
There’s nothing in that list of accomplishments to suggest that he was at all appropriately prepared to run an educational institution. But some people see dollar signs and figure that’s what a university is all about, so they bring in the money man.
Next up for eviction: Bruce Harreld.
During the Dec. 9 meeting of the UI Staff Council, Harreld said that any instructor who goes into a class without having completed a lesson plan “should be shot.”
The business world must be a really tough place if they routinely deal with difficulties with summary executions.
I think it’s super because it’s 8 days until Super Wednesday, which is my birthday. But also because of primary elections, and caucuses. My wife and I will be attending the local precinct caucus, and in case you wonder what’s involved in a Minnesota caucus, here’s a good summary. It’ll be just like that for us, except instead of holding it in a local school, the Morris DFL caucus will at the Old #1 Bar & Grill. Woo hoo! Super!
I must, however, lecture you on more than just the mechanics. Here are some things to do.
I shouldn’t succumb to the cat mania of the internet, but this collection of fantasy role playing cats is adorable, mainly because our cat is in it.
An assassin? Definitely. Probably chaotic evil, too.
Clearly, the best place for the mysterious island lair of a super-villain who likes invertebrates has to be Christmas Island. So cuddly!
I wonder if I could swap our cat for one?
Atheist Alliance International carried out a census, and discovered that their members 73% men…and most remarkably, they thought that was a problem! So instead of making excuses about how this was simply the natural order of things, they’ve released a report with recommendations for improving the gender balance.
< Atheist Alliance International has released a report on Gender Imbalance in the atheist community, its sources, and its possible responses and solutions.
Gender imbalance in the atheist / humanist community has been noted for many years, including in AAI’s own Atheist Census project. AAI has determined this gender imbalance to be a problem in our community, rooted in centuries-old patriarchal systems and promoted and defended by many of the world’s religions.
In today’s modernist world with recognized human rights for women as outlined in the UN’s Convention on Women’s Rights, AAI believes that gender imbalance, both in our own communities as well as in the general populace, is an important issue for atheists to embrace and work to overcome as part of our responsibility to our humanity.
The report has been added to AAI’s Position Statements webpage and can be read there.
I just read it — it’s short, just 9 pages — and I can tell that a few people are going to be furious. Yay!
