I’m so sorry, Florida

Minnesotans are going to be apologizing for this for a good long while (Why? Because we’re so darn nice and we hate to see pain inflicted on others). Cheri Yecke is clawing her way to greater responsibility in the Florida educational system.

On the other side of the equation, state K-12 chancellor Cheri Yecke has announced that she will seek the commissioner’s chair.

Yecke, who has led the education departments in Virginia and Minnesota, came to Florida two years ago, abandoning a run for Congress in Minnesota.

“The whole battle about standards and accountability was fought and won here a long time ago,” Yecke told Times. “Folks in Florida are moving forward in a very positive way. To me, that is just so refreshing. I would like to stay here.”

Yecke was head of our state education department for a time. She’s a creationist sympathizer with a sneaky, conniving way of weaseling the intelligent design agenda into the school curriculum. Floridans, you don’t want her running your education system. You might want to think instead about passing a law not allowing Yecke to approach within 30 yards of any school.

Greg Laden comments on our Yecke history, too. We were scarred, I tell you, scarred.

Pregnant? Feeling bloated?

Here’s a picture to make you feel relatively fortunate, from the April 2007 issue of Natural History:

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Naked mole rats are odd little mammals in which only the queen of the colony gets to breed. The point of this picture is that even when not near the end of their term of pregnancy, they are recognizably distinct from other rats in the colony — they tend to be much longer. The reason is that the hormones during pregnancy, and probably also the physical stresses on their body, induces the lumbar vertebrae to actually grow longer. Humans, fortunately, do not grow a couple of inches vertically with each child.

Man Thru History

I was asked my opinion of this strangely engrossing drawing titled “Man Thru History”. It’s one of those huge multi-paneled works with lots of little details that draw your eye in—I looked everywhere for Waldo but couldn’t find him. Anyway, here’s one panel out of 23:

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While the details are fun to pore over, I can’t say that I’m impressed with it overall. There are too many distortions.

  • Start with the title: “Man thru history”. That’s actually accurate, in a sense. It’s an illustration of a particular man’s perception of history.
  • While most of the figures are just standing, men are either committing violence, having violence done to them, or having sex. The only active women are having sex.
  • There’s an awful lot of pink. Should it have been titled “White Man Thru History”?
  • Everyone is conventionally attractive: slender, curvy women and muscular, athletic men. They’re also all clean and youthful. Where’s the variation in body type and age and race?
  • It’s actually not very representative. There should be more people suffering from disease, more women the target of violence, and lots of dead babies.

Anyway, it’s got next to nothing to do with history. Maybe it should have been titled “Comic book artist practices figure drawing.”

We need a new gender

Because I’m really sick of sharing one with these pigs.

Really, they aren’t my kind.

Basics: Neurulation

When we had last seen our basic embryo, it had gone through gastrulation — a process in which cells of a two-layered sheet had moved inward, setting up the three germ layers (endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm) of the early embryo. In particular, cells at the organizer, a tissue that induces or organizes migrating cells, had rolled inwards to set up specific axial mesoderm structures: the prechordal plate, which will underlie cranial structures, and the notochord, which resides under the future hindbrain and spinal cord. At this point, the embryo has an outer layer of ectoderm, and lying under part of it, a band of prechordal mesoderm and notochord. In addition, the ectoderm is loaded with a molecule called BMP-4, a member of the TGF-β family of signaling molecules, and under its influence will go on to make skin, not nervous system. So what next?

[Read more…]

Stop it. Just stop it.

OK, I can understand copying Wikipedia and setting up your own special interest wikis all over the place—it’s an admission that your goals are too dorky or too stupid to survive outside your own special little incubator—but if you’re going to set up your own social networking site, why would you copy MySpace, the ugliest, most awkward, most annoying such site on the planet? It’s like declaring that not only do you lack any creativity or imagination, but that you are totally tasteless, too.

Behold: His Holy Space. It’s like an online ghetto for Christians. Take the cluttered, disorganized look of MySpace and drape it with Kincade paintings and animated doves and angels, and you’ve got His Holy Space. Why, I don’t know. Some things are just mysteries.

(via The Friendly Atheist)