Our local chapter of Drinking Liberally will be meeting at a special place and time tonight: it will start at 7:00, at the American Legion Beer Garden at the Stevens County Fair. After everyone has had enough beer, we will adjourn to the Tilt-A-Whirl to relive those sensations we all experienced in the 2004 elections.
archy warns us of an invasion of giant commie crabs. Invasive species are no joke, but in this case, I can think of some solutions: they all revolve around lunch and dinner, though.
Phosphatized pre-Cambrian embryos are cool. It’s amazing that they’ve been preserved at all, and they are spectacularly gorgeous. We can learn about the evolution of development from their superficial appearance, but what we really want to do is poke around their interiors and analyze them cell by cell, something that has been hard to do without destroying them in the process. Until now.
A report in Nature (and a too short mention on a researcher’s web page) describes the application of synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy (SRXTM) to these fossilized embryos to resolve their internal structure. It’s a powerful tool, and it’s generating some beautiful images.
In regional news, the Catholic church is getting sued. Two hundred bishops have been named in a lawsuit filed by a Wisconsin family. I suspect you won’t even need to read the article to guess what it’s about.
That’s right: a conspiracy by the church hierarchy to protect a pedophile priest.
This priest committed suicide after the police homed in on him in a murder investigation, which makes it a little more sordid. Apparently, the priest, Ryan Erickson, argued with a local man about the accusations of child abuse, and shot him and an innocent bystander to shut him up. Erickson wasn’t just a messed up pedophile, he was a gun nut who wore a pistol under his robes at Mass, and had a reputation as a histrionic religious fanatic, even more so than you’d expect of a priest. One of the bizarre revelations at that last link is that the guy was also in charge of sex education for his parish, and was particularly interested in suppressing and condemning masturbation. I guess, actually, it’s not masturbation if you get a little boy to help you out.
I’ll be very surprised if this lawsuit goes anywhere, though. Religion is always regarded as a solid defense.
That Moonie creationist with a degree in developmental biology, Jonathan Wells, floated an actual hypothesis a while back: he postulated that the centrioles were little turbines that generated a force with their rotation. I never saw it as much of a support for Intelligent Design; it was an idea about how centrioles function that did not rule out that they arose by evolutionary mechanisms. Wells seemed to think it was significant because he was inspired by an analogy with a human artifact, but la de da…I don’t think benzene rings are actually made of snakes, despite Kekule’s inspiration.
Anyway, now Ian Musgrave hammers another stake through that idea’s heart: Wells’ hypothesis is falsified.
Uh-oh. This is something I never want to meet in a dark alley.
Slacktivist reminds us that today is the 61st anniversary of an atrocity:
I think that real patriotism, and the first step to making your country better, is the recognition of evil done in its name.
Jake Young has a good discussion of gender differences and performance in the sciences. His conclusion is one I agree with: there are real differences between men’s and women’s brains, but they are not of a sort to account for the differences in representation in scientific fields. For that, we have to go to culture, and the imposition of extrinsic limits on what people are allowed to do.
I’d better go home and put on my “Welcome Squid Overlords” t-shirt—someone has caught an octopus…in the Ohio River.
Unfortunately, this is almost certainly a case of some bastard bringing a cephalopod home, allowing it to die, and throwing it out like a piece of garbage. When the cephalopod overlords do show up, I hope they take care of him/her first.
