I’m going to have to scrutinize transfer student transcripts more carefully

Would you believe a Nebraska community college is offering a course in creationism … and awarding science credits for it? If any McCook Community College students tried to transfer to my university, I’d argue that any who took that course ought to get negative credits because we’d have to assign additional corrective work to scour the garbage out of their brain.

The course is offered as a physics class. I’m getting a bit fed up with the arrogance of some physicists and engineers, could you please police your own? I can’t imagine a biology faculty member trying to create a course that taught his or her own idiosyncratic vision of physics, one that defied the expertise of their physics colleagues, but some physicists and engineers seem more than willing to declare biology to be all wrong.

Women’s health? Or women’s suppression?

One of my favorite blogs around is The Well-Timed Period, and it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t get more attention: it’s greatest strength also militates against it achieving widespread popularity (which is more a flaw in how the internet and blogs work than with the blog itself). It’s so beautifully focused — it’s all reproductive health all the time.

For example, Ema mentions that Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) has been playing legalistic games to hold up the use of RU-486. He makes claims like this:

The reported risk of death associated with RU-486 is ten times greater the risk associated with surgical abortions. The death rate associated with surgical abortion is one in a million. By contrast, the reported risk of death associated with RU-486 is higher than one in 100,000.

If you’d been reading W-TP, you’d know that DeMint is playing fast and loose with the facts. The risk of death from an abortion before 8 weeks is about 1 in a million, but the death rate from a surgical abortion is about 1 in 140,000, and the risks are increasingly greater the later in the term the operation is carried out (there’s a reason doctors want the option to do what the press calls “partial birth abortions”—late term abortions are much more dangerous for the mother, and procedures that reduce the threat ought to be welcomed). You’d also know that he has left out an important and highly relevant statistic that puts it all in perspective: the risk of death from normal pregnancy and delivery is 1 in 8700. It’s a little weird to think that we put my beloved wife at risk of a 0.01% probability of dying 3 times just to spawn those ungrateful kids, but then again, her commute to work is more dangerous than that.

Statistics are strange things. Phrase them with the right twist, and you’ll be convinced that you ought to spend the rest of your life in your basement, surrounded by pillows; DeMint has twisted them outrageously to misrepresent his motives. If he were really interested in women’s health and safety, he’d be working to support universal health care, for instance — there are a lot of women who are poor and pregnant and at great risk, and responsible reproductive health ought to be among the first of our representatives’ concerns. The biggest lie in his press release is the implication that this is about women’s health; it’s not. It’s about limiting women’s choices and reproductive freedom.

It’s an honor, of sorts

She beat Brownback. She trounced Tancredo. She even clobbered Coburn. America’s Holiest Congressperson is Minnesota’s own Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

Bachmann, an Evangelical Lutheran, and self-professed “fool for Christ,” ran for Congress because God—and her husband—wanted her to. The representative publicly credited her campaign to her submission to her husband, who was channeling God’s wishes for her.

Prior to this higher calling, Bachmann earned a law degree from Coburn, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University, and helped found a charter school where she reportedly worked to prevent the Disney movie Aladdin from being shown, because it supposedly promoted paganism. Then, as a Minnesota state senator, Bachmann launched a crusade to outlaw gay marriage that turned into a highly publicized spectacle replete with restroom run-ins with angry lesbians and grainy photos suggesting that Bachmann was “spying” on a gay rights rally while crouching behind a bush.

Tireless in her pursuit, Bachmann has even gone so far as to be active in efforts to “rehabilitate” people who “suffer from ‘same-sex attractions,’ and once articulated the merits of being “hot for Jesus Christ.”

The magazine also has a list of our Ten Dumbest Congressperson — couldn’t they have saved some space by consolidating the two lists?

Apocryphal elements

If you’re trying to come up with names for an exotic element with amazing properties for that comic book, fantasy novel, or role-playing game you’re writing, here’s a list of apocryphal elements (there’s also a similar list with more details). These are all genuine false alarms from the world of science, guaranteed to have been generated from the twisted minds of actual chemists and physicists.

We really need elements called Ultimium and Extremium. Neokosmium isn’t bad, either.

Rotten old willow

We’ve been experiencing a great howling windstorm since yesterday — it seems to be a common event every spring around here that we get a storm or two just to teach the trees that this is supposed to be prairie. Our excitement for the day is that this huge old willow in our yard lost another limb, something like what happened two years ago. At that time, a major limb smacked down on the south side of the tree; this year, an even larger branch smashed down to the north. That monster is significantly bigger around than I am.

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Here’s Skatje sitting in the wreckage. She was very enthusiastic about getting out there and sawing at some of the lesser branches so we could swing the debris out of the road and the sidewalk. We’re going to have to get a professional tree service to take care of the rest.

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We’ve been lucky so far — the deadfalls have paralleled the house, and no one has been under them. Looking at what’s left of the tree, the next big branch to go is either going to fall to the east and take out our car, or to the west and take out the neighbor’s garage. Old Man Willow is out to get us, we may have to terminate him first.

We have an account of the Comfort/Cameron “proof”!

It was as inane as you might have expected. It turns out that
their “proof” of the existence of god was the coke can argument. If you don’t know what that argument is, here it is: it begins about 2½ minutes into this, and is over about 3½ minutes in. He could have done it all in one minute!

I’m sorry, but if you’re at all convinced by that pathetic argument, please, get help.

Comfort simply asserts that everything that exists had to have a creator. He goes on to build a silly argument: buildings must have a builder, paintings must have a painter, therefore creation must have a creator. We’ve been having a storm here in Morris, so I guess when I hear thunder I should assume there is a thunderer.

Anyway, I guess I don’t need to tune in to the broadcast on Wednesday, and I don’t have to worry about bothering a priest to tend to my conversion—those two guys are blithering cretins.