Kentucky does good

One of the most vocal pro-creationist governors in the country, Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky (home of Ken Ham’s infamous creationist “museum”) has had his re-election bid go down in flames. This is fabulous news. Revere sees it as one more sign of the impending demise of the religious right — I can’t be quite so optimistic, since they always seem to resurrect themselves. Greg Laden is also pleased with the result. He also takes exception to the claim that creationism is properly taught in social studies and comparative religion classes — and to that, I’d add the frequent suggestion that it belongs in philosophy classes. It does a disservice to all of those disciplines. At best, it ought t be mentioned in abnormal psychology classes, as an example of the madness of crowds or of religious hysteria.

And a pleasant evening was had by all

This is going to be a big problem. I’m at this gathering of bloggers, which means they’re all going to be posting stuff about our meeting here at Americans United, and I’m outnumbered — I can’t keep up. I had dinner with Blue Gal, BAC, DCup, and One Pissed Off Veteran, and some of them already have pictures up.

And after dinner we had the combined Pharyngula/Bad Astronomy gathering, which seemed to have a majority of BA fans, to my chagrin. I think more failed to show up because they know I shoot laser beams out of my eyes. We also got a surprise visit from Tara and an Evil Monkey. The ScienceBorg Collective was out in force, trying to collect souls for the Empire — we leaned on Phil a bit, but he is stubborn. Clearly, it’s time to deploy the fully operational…but wait, I’ve said too much.

Anyway, anyone who was there should speak up in the comments, and feel free to leave a link — it will simplify my efforts to keep track of everyone.

Oh, one guy it’ll be easy to keep up with is Phil, who is still unconscious up in the room. I guess he needs his beauty sleep.

Sokal’d!

Laugh, everyone! A bunch of the people who reject scientific ideas about global warming, including a certain big fat fish and quite a few right wing blogs, were taken in by a fake paper that claimed that “concerns about manmade global warming are unfounded.” If you have even the slightest acquaintance with math, all you have to do is glance at the paper to see that the equations are all gibberish.

Nature has a summary, and an interview with the author of the hoax.

Of course, it’s not exactly comparable to the Sokal hoax since this one didn’t take in the mainstream climatologists at all…only a collection of fringe pundits who oppose an inconvenient reality.

Those degenerate French…

You have to see the mascot for Orangina, some fruity drink, to believe it. She’s kind of hot in a peculiarly cephalopod/tetrapod hybrid way, but then…the video. Oh. My. Non-existent. God. Sex and furries. She gives a lap-dance to a bear-man and squeezes orange juice out of her mammaries.

My brain is scarred. I don’t think I could ever drink Orangina without thoughts of bestiality frolicking unbidden through my head.

(No thanks to Jim Lippard for contaminating my brain with this stuff.)

The Catholic League catches on to our latest subterfuge in the War on Christmas

The Catholic League is afraid parents might see The Golden Compass…and then buy the books for a Christmas gift. Horrors! You can’t give books by atheists on Christmas! Watch the video from Fox News to witness the outrage. Also, I have to love this quote from a Christian who opposes the movie fervently, despite never having seen it or even reading the books. But he has his reasons.

I don’t have to read the book, I’ve never been bitten by a snake either, but I, you know, it’s not something that I have to do to know that it’s not going to, that it’s not necessarily going to be a good thing for me.

In related news, snakebite victim’s family sues. Would you believe a religious snake-handler was bitten by the snake she was playing with to demonstrate her faith, and it bit her? And now her family is upset because she died at the hospital. Shouldn’t they be suing God instead, because he promised that those strong in their faith would be unharmed by poison? Or maybe they ought to find fault in the woman, who clearly was not faithful enough.

Hey, maybe the Bible was actually prophesying The Golden Compass — the snakes in Mark 16:17-18 are actually metaphors for Philip Pullman, promising that the faithful will be unharmed if they watch this movie.

Can we at least demand “Secular Communion”?

Here’s another provocative article from the New Humanist titled “Holy Communion”, a critique of two of the “New Atheists”. It has an incredibly offensive illustration to go with it, but the article isn’t quite that bad. It’s not that good, either.

First, I have to confess: I’m not a humanist. I’m just not that keen on defining myself by my species, and I’m not going to join a group that willfully excludes squid. Still, I sympathize with the aims of secular humanism and I’m willing to work alongside them, just as I’m willing to work with reasonable Christians and Muslims — I’m just not ever going to be one of them, and I’m not going to hold fire and abstain from criticizing them.

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Student Post: Running With Neurons

We’ve been talking quite a bit about how information is processed in our brains so that a specific reflexes and cognitive actions can be produced. It’s also the end of the cross country season and my mind has been mixing the two. Take Steve Prefontaine (one of the greatest American long distance runners of all time) for example. I was watching a video clip of Prefontaine running and paused it right as he was putting his foot down and picking his other leg up. He doesn’t extend his leg out very far. Instead, he lifts his knee up so that he can drive his pronated foot into the ground just under his hip. Since his foot is already pronated, he can further drive his leg behind him and use the ball of his foot as a launch pad to drive himself forward. This technique saves a lot of energy and keeps the runner mostly in the air, rather than on the ground (which is what you want).

Sadly, no one brought the technique to my attention until about halfway through college. I’ve been overextending my legs without picking up my knees, landing on my heels, and rolling to the balls of my feet. This means I use more energy and a lot more time in projecting myself forward each stride. Ever since I learned of proper running techniques I’ve been trying to make them an automatic reflex in my strides, but this is incredibly hard to do.

For the past twenty two years, neurons in the motor cortex of my frontal cortex, cerebellum, Thalamus, and several other regions of my brain have been adapting to coordinate specific muscle actions to create my presently crappy running technique. This spider web of nervous tissue is constantly changing as neurons diverge and converge on each other, become more sensitive to or produce higher concentrations of specific neurotransmitters, and develop other specific interactions with other neurons that perfectly coordinate my behavior and actions. However, it has taken twenty two years to perfectly coordinate all this interaction so that I can run so terribly, meaning that learning to truly run could take a long time as I prune and pair more neurons to coordinate a totally different reflex.

So far I’ve been trying to reshape my neural network by doing one legged hang cleans. In the exercise I have to shrug a large amount of weight off one leg in a lunging position, get under the weight in mid air and catch it as it comes down in the same position. It is difficult to catch the weight without landing on the ball of my foot, which is pleasantly placed directly under my hips, making my body develop the correct foot placement as a reflex. This learning is actually the reshaping of the network of neurons inside my brain that deal with motor coordination as they make new interactions, destroy old ones, change their amplification of signals, or change their functions completely. At any rate, I haven’t even scratched the surface of how intertwined the processes are that go inside this skull of mine to create who I am and the things that I do. But I do find the little I know pretty amazing, and can only hope that my non-declarative memory will eventually kick in.
To see the proper running form, take a look at Michael Johnson in his world record 200m race.at the 1996 olympics.