He was chummy with everyone, though.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The US has done wonderfully well in collecting Nobel prizes this year, but there’s no reason to be complacent. There’s a lot of momentum in our science establishment, the result of solid support for many years, but there are troubling signs that the engines of our advance, the young minds of the next generation, aren’t going to be propelling us as well. Take this report by science educators, for instance:
“We are the best in the world at what we do at the top end, and we are mediocre — or worse — at the bottom end,” said Jon Miller, of Michigan State University, who studies the role of science in American society.
A revised curriculum at Harvard may include a required course in religion, as Jim Downey has brought to my attention. There isn’t enough information in the article to decide how to regard this decision, though; I don’t object automatically to requiring college kids to learn to think critically about religion, and I would hope that a course at Harvard wouldn’t be anything like a tutorial in Jebus-praising at Pensacola Christian College, but who knows? The summary is impossibly vague.
“I think 30 years ago,” when the school’s curriculum was last overhauled, “people would have said that religion is not something that everyone needs to know,” said Louis Menand, a Harvard professor and co-chairman of the committee that drafted the report. “But today, few would disagree that religion is supremely important to modern life.”
In the same way that knowledge of cholera and dysentery would be supremely important to a 19th century city dweller? It sounds like any of a number of courses would fit the requirement of discussing “the interplay between reason and faith“, so it doesn’t sound like much of a change to me…except, of course, that it would be treated as a PR coup by the religious.
Here’s a marvelous idea: a race to sequence 100 people’s genomes in 100 days, with a nominal prize of 10 million dollars. As a tool to motivate the discovery of new technologies and gain prestige, I approve. It’s unfortunate that it is so anthropocentric, though. A similar contest to sequence 100 species genomes in 100 days would be much cooler, and would contribute far more to our understanding.
They’ve also got a second 100 genomes to sequence that will be drawn from a pool of celebrities. I have reservations there; the ones named seem to be mainly people who happen to be filthy rich (i.e., likely to donate money to feed their vanity), rather than ones that have some biological interest. If you’ve got to pick a celebrity, go for ones with specific physical attributes that will generate potentially interesting comparisons: what about sports stars and chess champions?
Of course, what defeats the whole intent of this contest is that they ought to just hand the samples to that technician on CSI, and he’d whip out the whole shebang in a half-hour.
The Twin Cities were
infested with a rather noxious parasite this week: Dobson and his crew of holy bible-thumpers. I know the Minnesota Atheists were out protesting, but Eva and Avidor actually attended the event, and came back with videos. So, if you really want to see Gary Bauer again, or watch the crowds swoon over James Dobson, Lloyletta has the YouTube links.
Try browsing Prides and Prejudices, the musings of a sardonic high school English teacher—that’s my favorite kind!—without getting sucked in. She writes everything from a paean to the woodlouse to
modern gift-giving etiquette. (I had no idea the iPod Shuffle was so déclassé, but then I’ve been away from the dating scene for a long time; the last gift I gave my wife when she was my girlfriend might have been a sweater.)
You may have heard about that odd hothead mutation in Arabidopsis that seemed to be violating a few principles of basic genetics—there was an unexpectedly high frequency of revertants that suggested there might be a reservoir of conserved genetic information outside the genome. Reed Cartwright proposed an alternative explanation, that gamete selection could skew the results. Now the latest reports suggest that the bias was an artifact of foreign pollenization (which I think is interesting in itself. Life is damned good at sneaking its genes in wherever it can.)
Anyway, if that’s all gobbledygook to you, Scientific American has put up a lucid summary of the hothead affair. It’s an example of good science, where the observations and hypotheses are hammered out and refined to get a best explanation.
We’re hoping he’ll announce that he’s going to run against Coleman in 2008 from the stage here at Morris—he was playing coy with Jon Stewart because, pffft, you want to make such important statements in places that matter, that have resonance.
Drinking Liberally is cancelled this week in Morris. If you’re really hard up, you could go to the DL in Minneapolis, but really, why would you want to? We’ve got Al Franken, star of TV and radio, founder of the Midwest Values PAC, and best-selling author entertaining us at a DFL fundraiser here in our little town, so we’re a much more exciting place than that urban mess to the east. I think there are still tickets available, but I know they were going fast a few days ago—call Jeff Lamberty at (320) 585-5646 if you’re interested. Nope, sorry, you were too late. Sold out! Good for the Stevens County DFL!
Also, on Friday, from 11-2, the Al Franken show will be broadcast from Edson Auditorium on the UMM campus. If you can’t be here this evening, you can catch a little whiff of the Morris mystique (no, that’s not the swine farm or the ethanol plant) by tuning in to Air America tomorrow.
Ultrasound imaging technology is coming along so fast that you can now get a near-real time, moderate resolution image of a living fetus. Unfortunately, this new technology is also having an unfortunate consequence.
