Morris Area High Schools … for Christ

Speaking of bad teaching and schools that screw up under community pressure, it looks like we have an ugly story here in Morris. Last week, the student at the Morris Area High School were released from classes (you know, those sessions where they are supposed to learn something) to listen to some motivational speaker babbling about healthy lifestyles and abstinence, and apparently telling them that Madonna was a lesbian, among other tidbits. I’ve only heard third-hand about the event itself — Skatje‘s still in touch with friends at the high school, but she didn’t actually attend herself — but now there’s an article in the local paper on it.

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The PITA factor

The creationists don’t have to win their court cases to have an effect: all they have to do is threaten and badger teachers, and they effectively intimidate many into avoiding evolution, or work to make sure qualified science teachers don’t get hired at all. It happens here, and now it’s happening in the UK.

Teachers in UK schools are avoiding teaching evolution in science classes to avoid conflict with students, especially Muslims, who believe in creationism.

I don’t have any sympathy for students or their parents who think an education is a process of affirming what you think you already know.

How not to manage comments on a blog

When you think of Uncommon Descent (something I’m sure we all avoid as much as possible), the weblog of Bill Dembski and friends, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe Intelligent Design advocacy is near the top, but their pyrrhic censorship policies have also got to be up there. At least the reverse is true: if you think about blogs with bad policies on comments, on transparency, on maintenance, with capricious administration and a ruthless dedication to silencing any critics, UD is the premier instance.

Well, somebody had to vent about it. I think it’s fine, actually: it’s great entertainment to watch them strenuously work to discredit themselves, and the gang at the Official Uncommonly Dense Discussion Thread think so, too.

More priests behaving badly

That conservative Christian who offed himself in an autoerotic embarrassment? That’s simply sad, and reflects poorly on a repressive culture. This story, of a Catholic priest who collaborated in kidnappings and torture, is just plain evil, and is something completely different.

Christian Von Wernich, 69, was chaplain to the Buenos Aires police force. He used this position to obtain confessions from prisoners, which he then passed on to police who tortured them at secret detention centers.

Von Wernich was convicted of complicity in seven murders, 31 cases of torture and 42 abductions in the Buenos Aires region; a mere smattering of the estimated 30,000 disappearances during the military junta’s countrywide purge of leftists.

And before everyone starts suspecting I think all religious people are repressed sexual obsessives or mass murderers, I’ll clarify: I don’t think these people are messed up because of religion. I think they’d be messed up if they were atheists, too. But what we can clearly see is that religion doesn’t help, and may in some cases make a problem worse. Religion, far from being a force for morality in the world, is a mask that promotes the appearance of normality while allow some truly wretched ideas to fester beneath.

The mask is crumbling, though, and at least more young people are seeing through the illusion.

Yicaris dianensis

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research

Early Cambrian shrimp! I just had to share this pretty little fellow, a newly described eucrustacean from the lower Cambrian, about 525 million years ago. It’s small — the larva here is about 1.8mm long, and the adults are thought to have been 3mm long — but it was probably numerous, and I like to imagine clouds of these small arthropods swarming in ancient seas.

i-c756e0e5bdb78bf9c1a44de3ecced403-yicaris.gif
The head limbs are drawn in median view and the trunk limbs in lateral view.

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Isn’t this beginning to get a little ridiculous?

You know, when a conservative Christian minister, graduate of Liberty University, and friend of Jerry Falwell is found dead under these circumstances…

Clothing: The decedent was received wearing two (2) wet suits, one scuba diving mask, one pair of diving gloves, one pair of slippers, one pair of rubber underwear, two (2) ties, five (5) belts, eleven (11) straps.

Personal Effects: One yellow metal ring intact on left ring finger, one dildo.

…you know that somehow, somewhere, someone is going to blame the liberals.

Although I think Mrs Tilton has the right response — it’s a shame and a waste that someone spent a life sanctimoniously denouncing people just like him. If he’d been a godless liberal, maybe he would have joined a club, been a little happier, had a lot less self-loathing, and still be alive today.

But man, two wetsuits? A little moderation in all things is a wise dictum.

To my students: a question for the neurobiology exam

My students are getting their first take-home exam in neurobiology tomorrow, and I’m using this entry to give them a convenient link to a paper they’re expected to analyze. The rest of you people can just ignore this.

1. We’ve discussed the ionic basis of the action potential and had an overview of channel properties. I’d like you to read the following paper from a recent issue of Nature, which neatly combines several subjects we’ve discussed:

Binshtok AM, Bean BP, Woolf CJ (2007) Inhibition of nociceptors by TRPV1-mediated entry of impermeant sodium channel blockers. Nature 449, 607-610.

There is also a News and Views summary in the same issue, A local route to pain relief, that will give you a digested version of the article.

It’s a clever experiment to generate a very specific analgesia. I want you to do two things in an essay:

  1. Half the essay should be a short description of the TRPV1 ion channel: specificity, permeability, gating, pharmacology, and structure. You’ll need to do some research beyond this one paper to answer the question adequately.

  2. The rest should be a critical analysis of the voltage-clamp method used in the Binshtok et al. paper. Don’t try to explain every result in the paper: focus on a key result and show me that you understand how to interpret the experiment and can explain the meaning of the data.

Oh, also! Let’s plan on meeting in the Turtle Mountain Cafe tomorrow morning instead of the classroom, again — I’ll need my coffee while we discuss chapters 10 and 11 of Soul Made Flesh.

Lazowska on the politicization of science and our uninspiring educational system

This is an excellent brief overview of the crucial problems in American education by Ed Lazowska, a computer scientist and engineer at the University of Washington who also served on an advisory committee under GW Bush. From his first hand view, he does not seem kindly disposed towards Republican policies in science.

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New Christian fascism and hate

We’re seeing an ugly form of intolerance creeping into the western states, carried with slavic evangelicals who hate homosexuals.

A growing and ferocious anti-gay movement in the Sacramento Valley is centered among Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking immigrants. Many of them are members of an international extremist anti-gay movement whose adherents call themselves the Watchmen on the Walls. In Latvia, the Watchmen are popular among Christian fundamentalists and ethnic Russians, and are known for presiding over anti-gay rallies where gays and lesbians are pelted with bags of excrement. In the Western U.S., the Watchmen have a following among Russian-speaking evangelicals from the former Soviet Union. Members are increasingly active in several cities long known as gay-friendly enclaves, including Sacramento, Seattle and Portland, Ore.

Vlad Kusakin, the host of a Russian-language anti-gay radio show in Sacramento and the publisher of a Russian-language newspaper in Seattle, told The Seattle Times in January that God has “made an injection” of high numbers of anti-gay Slavic evangelicals into traditionally liberal West Coast cities. “In those places where the disease is progressing, God made a divine penicillin,” Kusakin said.

That’s a mild example of their rhetoric. Under the cloak of their odious religious beliefs, these holy thugs are on a hate-crusade against gays, and they’ve already killed at least one person, Satender Singh, for the ‘crime’ of not being heterosexual enough.

The Box Turtle Bulletin and Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion have more on these rather nasty immigrants … and their American enablers.