Apparently, everything is sectarian. Now I learn that Windows is the Christian OS, to my vast relief. I’ll stick with my secular humanist Mac OS X, with its Darwin core and its demonic platypus mascot.
Zeno has this quote from an acolyte of D. James Kennedy, Dr. Paul Jehle, and I have to shake my head in disbelief.
I was taking calculus. I was a mathematics major and I was at a Christian college that was called Christian, but was not Christian….
I asked a question to my calculus professor: “What makes this course distinctly Christian?” He stopped. He said no one has ever asked that question before…
He said, “Okay, I’m a Christian you’re a Christian.”
I said, “That’s not what I asked! What makes this calculus course distinctly Christian? What makes this different from the local secular university. Are we using the same text? Yes. Are you teaching it the same way? Yes. Then why is this called a Christian college and that one a non-Christian college?”
So the fact that taking a derivative isn’t accompanied by a few hallelujahs mean it isn’t Christian? Would it help if they wrote out “dχ / d†”? Maybe he needed to take this course, a calculus with bible verses, instead.
Or just maybe, that mathematics stuff is hellbound anyway.
The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell.
St Augustine
So what’s a professing Christian doing going to school as a math major, hmmm?
I’ve been getting swamped with links to this hot article, “Evolution reversed in mice,” including one from my brother (hi, Mike!). It really is excellent and provocative and interesting work from Tvrdik and Capecchi, but the news slant is simply weird—they didn’t take “a mouse back in time,” nor did they “reverse evolution.” They restored the regulatory state of one of the Hox genes to a condition like that found half a billion years ago, and got a viable mouse; it gives us information about the specializations that occurred in these genes after their duplication early in chordate history. I am rather amused at the photos the news stories are all running of a mutant mouse, as if it has become a primeval creature. It’s two similar genes out of a few tens of thousands, operating in a modern mammal! The ancestral state the authors are studying would have been present in a fish in the Cambrian.
I can see where what they’ve actually accomplished is difficult to explain to a readership that doesn’t even know what the Hox genes are. I’ve written an overview of Hox genes previously, so if you want to bone up real quick, go ahead; otherwise, though, I’ll summarize the basics and tell you what the experiment really did.
What do you do with a local politician who claims that public education is her #1 issue, while accepting money from supporters of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State? That’s our Michele Bachmann, claiming to be a supporter of education while endorsed by people who say this:
I proclaim publicly that I favor ending government involvement in education.
Take a look at the people who favor completely gutting public school education at the Separation of School and State site, too: D. James Kennedy, Tim LaHaye, Tom Monaghan—it’s like a chorus line of the freaky religious right. And our little Michele fits right in with them.
Shelley has something for people with a tentacle fetish. Are there any of those around here?
Any New Jersey readers out there? Anyone from Seaside Heights?
Why didn’t you tell me?
I had to find out about this exciting event in the grocery store checkout line. I was most interested to learn that it ravaged the shore line during a recent storm, but seems to have put most of its effort into destroying a church.
Hmmm. I didn’t do it, officer.
The burning question is, do I get one if I go mad?
This is the week of the Stevens County Fair, right here in bucolic Morris, Minnesota. It starts on Wednesday, 9 August and runs through Sunday the 13th, so you all still have time to start heading out this way. It’s your classic rural fair: there will be accordions, deep-fried anything on a stick, pig-judging, carnies, a demolition derby, country-western music, lawn mower races, 4H kids, and tractors, snowmobiles, and ice houses for sale. You have not lived until you have experience a midwestern county fair.
(Oh, and don’t eat the food if you want to continue living. It’s like jabbing your aorta with a turkey baster clogged full of pure cholesterol.)
I think we’re planning on having our weekly Drinking Liberally session at the beer garden at the fair, so there’s another reason for coming on Thursday evening.
I’m going to be there just about every day. I volunteered to man booths at various hours for UMM, our local humane society, and the Stevens County DFL. Come on down—the fair is free, parking is free, it is the thing to do in August.
We seem to be talking about breasts a lot this week, don’t we? Abel Pharmboy raises a provocative ethical question: is it crass or is it reasonable for breast cancer researchers to ask Hooters to promote breast cancer awareness? I’m of the opinion that we ought to get every penny we can from them, but stop short of giving any hint that we actually endorse their business…although I’d wonder if even asking them for their assistance is granting them respectability, or if acknowledging the assistance of Hooters would turn a serious event into a joke.
It’s probably best to post your answers to Terra Sigillata. I’d really be interested to see Twisty‘s opinion!
(Just a wild thought…I wonder how much money doctors could get for naming rights. Offer to change the name of the disease to Hooter’s™ cancer. I know, that’s even more tasteless than getting them to sponsor a meeting.)
I won’t post this lovely print directly, since it might not be safe for work—not because it shows breasts, but because if any of your passing colleagues know anything about molluscan anatomy, they’ll realize that that cephalopod is gnawing on her head and be horrified.
(hat tip to Leslie Madsen-Brooks)
