Hooterology?

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.)

The ubiquitous Francis Collins

Collins has another published interview in Salon. It’s sad, actually—in every new interview, he says pretty much the same thing, but he digs himself in a little deeper. I ordered his book the other day, and now I’m beginning to regret it; it’s beginning to sound like trite Christian apologetics with no depth, no self-reflection, no insight…just compound anecdotes intended to rationalize a conclusion he has arrived at with no evidence. It’s distressingly anti-scientific.

For instance, we get an expansion of his hiking anecdote:

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Sundry cephalinks

Here are a few miscellaneous cephalopod-related things people have sent me lately.

I guess I chose wisely

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Foreign Dispatches posts some digital camera recommendations, with explanations. I just went through a fair amount of research before going out and getting a new camera myself a few weeks ago, and it’s all good—most importantly, his best choice is the same camera I got for myself, the Nikon D50. Whew, what a relief. Don’t you hate it when you dump a bucket of loot on something and then you find a good review that tells you you should have got something else?

As he notes, how many millions of pixels you’ve got are no longer the most important criterion for a good camera. What settled me was that I finally wanted some good optics—the teeny-tiny cheap lenses on your standard point-and-shoot have always bugged me, and I wanted a camera body where I could actually mount some good lenses. Since my working camera for film (which I have hardly used in years now) was a Nikon 6006, that pretty much settled it for me, so I went with the camera body that would handle my Nikkor lenses.

One other thing Abiola didn’t mention in his review: a good camera is useful, but it isn’t the most important thing in good photography. I don’t consider myself a good photographer, but I’m not bad as a microscopist, and know by analogy what works. On a scope, you get the best objective you can afford, but when you’re working at micrography, you just sort of aim that at the specimen and forget about it. Where you put all your effort and fuss and tweak is in the illumination, and what you learn to appreciate is a condenser with all the knobs and dials and filters. Same with a camera; you want to be able to point a good light collector at your subject, but the difference between a blah picture and a great one is the lighting.