Carnivalia, and an open thread

Here are a few carnival announcements, but mainly what I’ve got is announcements of impending carnivals—there’s going to be a bunch coming out next week, I guess.

Discuss the imminent dissolution of the blogosphere into collections of links linking to other collections of links, which will lead either to irrelevance and destruction, or reach a critical level of self-reference that will generate consciousness as an emergent property. Or whatever else you feel like.

Bachmann profile

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I’ve been reading Thomas Franks’ What’s the Matter with Kansas?(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), and then today I read the excellent profile of Michele Bachmann in the City Pages. Yikes. The similarities are terrifying. Bachmann is a clueless ideologue who has harnessed the power of the Religious Right to ride to political power on issues like discriminating against gays and promoting creationism; she’s the kind of candidate who preaches piety while legislating for the abolition of the minimum wage, exactly the sort Franks describes as wrecking Kansas while claiming to save its soul.

She’s in a tight race with Patty Wetterling in Minnesota’s Sixth district—this is the one I’ll be watching in November, and I sure hope this state doesn’t elect such an odious, sanctimonious fraud.

Friday Cephalopod: I’ve been there

The paternal view of childbirth is that you watch the mother struggle for hours, the child finally emerges, the midwife cleans him* up, hands him to you, and that’s when he unloads a bladder full of pee on you. This photo of a newly hatched bobtail squid’s first reflex reminds me of that…

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Euprymna tasmanica juvenile releasing ink on hatching.

Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.

*Boys are the most obvious culprits, since when they cut loose they hose down your shirt; girls discreetly dampen their blankies.

Will this work?

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.

[Read more…]

Mixed feelings

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.

A genomic X Prize

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.

A recommendation

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.)