How nice—having an open thread overnight provided me with some entertaining reading this morning!
Henrik Aasted Sørensen mentioned this fascinating description of a creationist comic book—it has an account of evil angels leading the dinosaurs on a last-minute assault on Noah’s Ark, and announces that ‘THIS EVENT IS NOT A FABLE AND IS NOT A “MYTH”…IT IS VERIFIABLE SCIENTIFIC FACT!‘ It looks like a fun story, but what might the evidence for this be?
Penguins on the freeway—that must have been an interesting sight. A truck overturned in Texas, releasing the animals, and several were taken out by passing cars.
The good news is that there was also an octopus in the truck, and it came through the accident unharmed. I’d kind of like to know the details of that one.
CNN is also reporting some roadkill in Connecticut. I never cared for the sanctimonious git so I’m less concerned about that one.
Here’s an idea: a young woman takes a picture of herself every day, and assembles it into a movie. It’s off to an interesting start, but she’s at a developmental stage where the changes aren’t happening very rapidly, so she pretty much looks the same at the beginning as at the end.
Alex has a quick cheat sheet for the different kinds of RNA…but wait! Where’s mtRNA?
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.
