Green UMM

One of the goals of my university is to go green: we’re working on wind and biomass power, we support local foods, we’re making a major initiative to add environmental studies to our curriculum, and we’re about to build a green dorm on campus. One interesting tack the green dormies are taking is to keep the public informed with a Green Dorm blog. So far, it’s awfully dry reading and its not really taking advantage of the medium well — each post is little more than a link to a pdf document from the planning process — but they are open to comment, at least.

Maybe they should consult someone who knows better ways of putting information on the web, though.

Scalzi suffers for our sins

Last June, we goaded science-fiction author, blogger, and professional wise-ass John Scalzi into promising to visit Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” (actually we bought his attendance by sending him money, which he turned around and donated to Americans United for Separation of Church and State).

Well, Scalzi finally makes good on his promise. It was worth it. There’s both an essay and a photo tour. He was amused by it all.

Indeed, it’s over the top enough that I never could actually get angry with the place. Not that I was planning to; I admit to dreading coming to the place, but that’s primarily because I thought it would bore and annoy me, not make me angry. In fact, I was never bored, and was genuinely annoyed only by the “paleontologist” at the start of the walk-through. The rest of the time I enjoyed it as I suspect anyone who is not some stripe of creationist could enjoy it: As camp. At some point — specifically the part where the Scopes Monkey Trial was presented as the end of decent Christian civilization as we know it — I just started chuckling my way through. By the time I got to the Dinosaur Den, with its placards full of patent misinformation about how soft tissue fossilization strongly suggested a massive, worldwide flood, I was a little loopy. It was just so ridiculous.

There’s some understanding for why the silly place is popular (apparently, attendance is quite good), and a recognition that it’s all one big, ridiculous joke.

Zebrafish Lab Progress

As I wrote about before, my semester lab project for neurobiology has to do with regeneration. The idea is to damage the spinal cord and observe wonderful regeneration. This proposal was based on some articles I read about regeneration of zebrafish hearts, fins, tails, etc. Unfortunately I haven’t had much luck so far.

Last week, armed with an exacto knife, I performed my first round of spinal cord butchering on fifteen zebrafish that were only a few days old. The zebrafish are captured with a glass pipet and then immobilized using auger that’s just warm enough to be in liquid phase. They are then mounted on a slide under the stereoscope. I quickly discovered many faults in my methods, one of which being that I captured the fish in too many drops of water so when the auger was added in a test tube, the fish weren’t completely immobilized. I would then carefully approach a fish with the exacto knife on the slide under the scope and it would turn into a bucking bronco. Eventually I perfected the art of capturing the few day old zebrafish with the pipet and putting them in test tubes in only one drop of water, thus partially solving the immobilization issue.

The second problem I encountered is that there is nothing exact about an exacto knife under a stereoscope. Accomplishing this spinal cord severing is much like peeling an orange with a baseball bat in that it’s extremely difficult without making a mess. Even with the fish immobilized the tail doesn’t really stay put when pressure is applied with the seemingly crowbar sized exacto knife. The key to this dilemma, although I have yet to master it, is probably making the layer of auger on the slide as thin as humanly possible so that there isn’t as much room for movement.

All the zebrafish from my first attempt died. Two of them were alive for a day or so but barely. I did another round of zebrafish butchering with fifteen more fish yesterday (yes I enjoy spending my Sunday afternoon in the neurolab) and from what I could tell, all but two of them died immediately. I’ll have to see if the elite two are still swimming around today but if not, I’ll try yet another round of fifteen and see how it goes. If anyone has any ideas for instruments or methods that could improve my success, feel free to insert a comment.

Strong female role models do little girls no favor

Hey, you — you look really stupid with your jaw gaping open like that.

That was a little preemptive scorn to get you to prep yourself for this link: it’s a fellow complaining about women working as astronauts (and even commanders of the space shuttle!) inspiring little girls to emulate them and ending up throwing pampers and pepper (?) at each other. This part is really disturbing:

Whatever happened to young men looking for a good Christian wife and finding a young woman still clinging to her doll?

It’s about finding masculinity in infantilizing women. It’s the flip side of the posturing macho faux-masculinity of Kim du Toit (warning: that link will make real men, those who don’t think a strut and a gun defines male identity, gag).

The comments on the article are interesting, too. There are a lot of smart women chewing him to bits, but then…well, read it for yourself.

Its ok. Christ did command us to subjigate our will, and that is what is so hard for people to do in this day and age. It’s all about “ME” in this day and age. Christ taught us humility and charity. As Christians, we are not our own, we are bought with a price. Christ paid it. If God tells me to submit my will to my husband, who is also in Christ, who am I to defy God’s will?

(via John Lynch)

Behe gets reamed again

The middle-aged man named Ian Musgrave has replied to the grey-haired man Michael Behe in response to his recent condescending dismissal of the young woman Abbie Smith (don’t these irrelevant signifiers of age, sex, and status add so much to our understanding of the discussion?) It’s really all about fun with viral proteins, and Behe’s failure to understand the basics of the evolution of the same. I think I’d be reluctant to refer to him as “the middle-aged biochemist Michael Behe” anymore — a biochemist should know this stuff.

Behe replies. He seems to be in a bit of a snit.

Rapture of the Deep

In preparation for my trip to the Caribbean next semester, I spent this weekend taking a class to learn how to SCUBA dive. My class and I learned all about the necessary equipment, what to do in emergency situations, and how to stay safe while SCUBA diving. We also learned about the physics of pressure, volume and density, so that we could better understand what happens when you descend into the deep. This inevitably led to a conversation about Nitrogen narcosis.

Nitrogen narcosis, or “rapture of the deep”, is a condition in which the symptoms resemble those due to intoxication by alcohol. Divers experiencing nitrogen narcosis lose their decision making abilities, their focus, and their judgment, coordination and multitasking skills become impaired. What could this potentially mean for the diver? They could ignore safe diving practices because they feel invulnerable to the dangers of their surrounding environment (sounds a bit like the actions of those individuals who are intoxicated by alcohol).

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