Sneaky College Christianists

American River College has, as most colleges do, a student body organization that is elected by the students. They recently had their elections, and got a bit of a surprise: the right-wing Christian group had organized, appealed to the student on the basis of their shared religious beliefs, and swept the election. It also helped that they could call on ethnic identities — Sacramento apparently has had an influx of Slavic immigrants with an odd(er) and often rather nasty form of the Christian cult. These are the Slavic Christian groups that are hysterically homophobic—it’s evident on their club forum, too.

EVERYWHERE I LOOK, ON TV IN SCHOOL EVERYWHERE BUT IN CHURCH ALL I SEE IS GAY THIS, GAY RIGHTS THAT OPEN DISPLAYS OF THIER LIFESTYLE BEING PUSHED DOWN OUR THROATS, I KNOW THAT JESUS LOVES THE SINNER BUT HATES THE SIN, IT JUST APEARS THAT, THAT SIN IS BEING THRUST UPON US IS THERE NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE, IS THIS WHAT WE HAVE TO LOOK FORWARD TO, SODOMITES RUNNING AROUND, OPENLY PROMOTING THIER LIFESTYLE, GAY MARRIAGE, GAY PASTORS, GAY CHURCHES, ITS LIKE GETTING OUT OF CONTROL, AND ITS VERY SAD TO SEE THIS DAY COME TO LIGHT, AND THERE IS NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT.
THATS THE SADDEST THING EVER

They also seem to have a deep-rooted aversion to the period. And isn’t that just the cutest little example of suppressed homosexuality ever? All the pushing down throats and thrusting, and the poor little ranter is just so helpless.

Anyway, they organized and they got elected, which is fair enough. It’s still worrisome that people can be so easily manipulated by a candidate who is clearly batshit insane, but just the religious testimonial is enough to sway them. It’s what I dread about American elections in general: they are dominated by looney appeals to religious nonsense, and rational choice does not seem to come into it.

Of course, the fortunate thing about this petty coup is that, well, student organizations have some power to manage internal affairs, but don’t really have much say in the larger picture of running the college. This sentiment is absurdly impractical:

The other former member club member elected to the Student Association, Dennis Choban, listed his goals on his Student Association application form. They included “removing humanistic bias from certain courses (such as evolution science), and encouraging live discussion of nontraditional views in all classes.”

Student group leaders know that what is involved is largely sitting in meetings and managing paperwork that gets financial support from the administration flowing to campus organizations. If they go into this expecting to be able to purge gays, liberals, and evilutionists from the faculty, boy, are they ever going to be disappointed. And then there’ll be the laughing in their faces and the wasted effort and the growing sense of futility. But who knows, they seem to be repressed bottoms, they might like it.

Professor Post: Dear Students,

Dear students of Biol 4003: Neurobiology—

EXTRA CREDIT? You haven’t even turned in your final lab reports, and you’re already asking for extra credit? This speaks of a serious lack of confidence, and I don’t know that I should pander to your low self-esteem. Tell me instead that your work on the final exam and the last lab report will dazzle me so much that giving you a mere “A” will be insufficient, and I’ll have to come to your homes and clean your house to make up the difference.

Besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you that a cluttered lab is an active, happy lab?

And that tank with the yellowish water in it is actually a dilute bleach solution that I use for sterilizing. It is true that I should flush that and replace it with a fresh solution, though.

So maybe there is a place for having a lab clean-up day. I could make meticulousness part of the lab grade, and dock you all 10% of your score if the lab is in a less than sparkling state at the end of the term. Yeah, that’s what an evil professor should do … I’ll have to think about it.

New Hampshire NEA endorses … Huckabee?

What is wrong with the teachers in New Hampshire? They just endorsed Clinton for the Democratic candidate, and Huckabee for the Republicans. Huckabee is a deranged young earth creationist! Did the NEA just spit in the face of its science teachers? How could they possibly support a creationist?

Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, was the only Republican candidate to speak at the national NEA meeting in Philadelphia in July. His campaign also courted the New Hampshire chapter, and he was the only GOP candidate to meet with chapter officials, a source with the New Hampshire union said.

Oh. The NH NEA can be bought for cheap: just show up.

Student Post: Sleepless in Morris

Well… it’s about that time. You know, the end of the semester where you start every project you’ve had the semester to complete. At least that’s what I’m doing. I finally made some headway on my Neuro project during the past few weeks. I’m sleep depriving zebrafish; I had planned to devise a scheme using streams of bubbles that work on some obnoxious structure to generate a regular disturbance (alright it was PZ’s idea). However I finally admitted defeat about the same time I shattered a water heater and realized I had gotten nowhere.

Desperately I went to a local farm supply store to look for what I could only articulate as “a really really slow motor.” (I don’t want to hear any comments about torque or gears… A: I probably won’t understand you and B: at this point in the semester, it might make me weep.) I tottered over to what looked like the motor isle… although they could have been bombs or anchors because I wouldn’t have known the difference. I waited until my confused expression attracted an employee and asked if they had any of those “really really slow motors… to… um… turn a rod in my fish aquarium.” The guy actually looked offended like I asked for adult entertainment products. “We wouldn’t sell any of that here.” He replied stiffly. Fortunately his buddy overheard and offered, “You mean like a rotisserie?”

Brilliant! They tried to sell me a one hundred dollar rotisserie which I declined, but the idea was invaluable. Why didn’t I think of that? I was imagining a Rube Goldberg machine with a lot of hot glue. Anyway I found an old rotisserie motor for $5 and am quite pleased. Also, PZ put together a big black box in which I’ll hang a light on a timer. Not only will these fish be gently stirred but they’ll have the lights going on and off all night.

I would feel bad except I’m not sleeping either.

Olfactory nerves (student post)

Today in class we learned about the functioning of olfactory nerves. It was really quite interesting, especially to find out how the olfactory system is organized. Let’s begin in the nasal cavity. Here, present in the mucus layer, are projections of the olfactory receptor cells. Each receptor cell is only capable of binding to one specific type of odorant molecule. These receptor cells travel through the porous bone separating the skull from the nasal cavity, and feed into a specific glomerulus. Glomeruli are located in the olfactory bulb, and have multiple receptors feeding into them. However, each glomerulus receives input from only one receptor type. In the glomerulus, the receptor neurons make excitatory connections with other cells, whose own axons project into the olfactory cortex in the brain. What is cool here is that there are about 1000 different types of olfactory receptor neurons, which each have their own proteins. This means that there are most likely 1000-2000 genes encoding for olfaction. It has been shown that this is not a combinatorial system like that developed for immunity.

Another cool thing I learned was that every time someone blows their nose, they are losing part of their brain. Seriously though, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. What is really happening is that you are losing the olfactory receptor cells that protrude out into the mucus layer inside the nasal cavity. The neat thing is that these cells are able to regenerate, which is unusual for other human neural cells. I was wondering, if perhaps, due to the organization of the olfactory nerves, regeneration is able to happen because of the interaction between the olfactory receptor neurons and the glomeruli. Perhaps the protruding parts of the cells are able to be regenerated because they are actually only part of the cell, not the entire cell. If this is true, then if the glomerulus were destroyed, would that permanently destroy the sense of smell? Or would the glomerulus be capable of regeneration, like the olfactory receptor cells that feed into it?

Looking for a tenure track job in biology?

Hey, look here: we have an ad in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Position: Tenure-Track Position in Biology

Institution: University of Minnesota at Morris
Location: Minnesota
Date posted: 11/19/2007

Biology: The University of Minnesota, Morris seeks to fill a tenure-track position in vertebrate biology beginning August 18, 2008. Duties include: teaching undergraduate vertebrate systematics or natural history and sophomore level human physiology; curating and maintaining the discipline’s vertebrate collection; contributing to the university’s general education program; advising undergraduates; conducting research that could involve undergraduates; and sharing in service activities. Minimum qualifications: Ph.D. in zoology or a closely related field and two years experience teaching undergraduates (graduate TA experience acceptable). Send letter of application, resume, transcripts, teaching and research statements, and three letters of reference to: Biology Search Committee Chair, Division of Science and Math, University of Minnesota, Morris, Minnesota 56267-2128. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled. Screening begins January 7, 2008. The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer.

Cyber Scholars?

Those sneaky alumni organizations — they’ve always got new angles on how to get to you. The alumni magazine for the University of Oregon has a writeup on me and a current member of the UO faculty, Mark Thoma. Apparently, we are Cyber Scholars, professors who use the blogosphere to teach the world. I think we need some new academic robes to go with that designation — preferably something in silver fabrics, and with a jetpack.

Student Report: All I Want for Christmas is Synaesthesia

Today I’m looking at synaesthesia, but more specifically lexical-gustatory synaesthesia in which certain phonemes (smallest unit of speech such as the /l/ sound in jelly) trigger specific tastes. For example, in Jamie Ward and Julia Simner’s (2003) report, Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors, a case study was done on a forty year old business man who reported tasting specific tastes in response to certain phonemes. In this case the man reported tasting cake when the phoneme /k/ was used in a word. Synaesthesia is thought to occur due to the crossing over or connection of neurons in certain areas of the brain that regulate and process senses. However, there are differing theories as to how this arises.

One idea is that certain neural connections linking sensory areas are not destroyed in infant stages of development as done in normal development. Synesthetes therefore link one sensation with another because connections are not destroyed. The second theory is that, rather than sensory areas in the brain being directly connected, they are connected through neural pathways in higher processing areas. For instance, instead of just hearing a phoneme and having just any taste sensation, it is the processing of the sequences of phoneme in the word used that links to specific learned schemas connected to the phonemes leading then toward a specific taste. Ward and Simner examined this in their case study.

Through documentation of tastes stimulated by specific words and phoneme triggers, Ward and Simner found that their data supported the latter of the two theories. The largest support comes from the idea that the subject’s tastes are specific for certain learned phoneme association rather than just random association of tastes to arbitrary phonemes. For example, as stated earlier, certain phonemes consistently trigger specific tastes such as the phoneme /k/ and the taste of cake. Also, the use of semantics in the sensory process is a strong argument for higher processing connections as food names exhibit their tastes (cabbage triggers the taste of cabbage). Much of this may be because certain patterns of phonemes can trigger specific tastes that have the same sequence of phonemes. So college, having the phoneme sequence /edg/ triggers the taste of sausage which also contains the phoneme sequence /edg/. These associations are done through higher processing which is learned throughout life, supporting a connection through higher processing areas of the brain rather than direct connection between sensory areas.

Although the idea of a direct connection between sensory areas from birth is not disproved by the study, it has supported that there is higher processing connections involved that have developed through learning. There is still much work in the field of synaesthesia, and with any luck, it will lead us to a better understanding of how our brains develop and process information. But despite all this, the best thing to do right now if you are not a lexical-gustatory synesthete is eat leftover turkey, potatoes (cheesy or mashed), and some pumpkin pie. Happy holidays.
~Bright Lights