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Disco Institute is vamping in Iowa

I almost feel sorry for Guillermo Gonzalez. The Discovery Institute is turning him into a political football, and making his denial of tenure a far greater mess than is warranted. They're going to hold a press conference on Monday. The fight will rage on over Iowa State University astronomy professor Guillermo Gonzalez, who advocated for intelligent design, the theory that disputes parts of evolution, and lost a bid for tenure. Advocates for Gonzalez said in a release distributed Tuesday that they will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Des Moines. There, they said, they will discuss…

Have a jolly godless Christmas, all!

Albert Mohler never disappoints. If you want a peek at the smug, ignorant heart of modern American Christianity, the weekly columns of the president of the Souther Baptist Theological Seminary are good places to start. In his latest effort, he expresses surprise that atheists might enjoy the Christmas holidays. He's positively baffled that Richard Dawkins admits sharing in the traditions of his culture. The thought of Richard Dawkins singing any carols with explicit Christian content is difficult to hold — unless the Oxford professor intends to sing of a faith he does not profess. Stephen…

Zakaria States it Plain

CNN's Fareed Zakaria has by far the most intelligent take that I've seen on the Quran burning by pastor Terry Jones of Florida: Let's talk for a moment about the Quran burning in Florida and it's consequences. Most Americans are repulsed by the offensive actions of Pastor Terry Jones, a publicity-seeking extremist. But they must wonder how an isolated act like that could produce so much violence halfway across the world in Afghanistan. So let's trace the event. The Quran burning took place two weeks ago - to not much publicity. It was not highlighted by the international media and was not a…

Sullivan Tries Again

Andrew Sullivan takes another stab at the theodicy question. His new gambit plays off of this heartbreaking report of a young child with CIPA (Congential Insensitivity to Pain). As a result of not being able to feel pain, the child is constantly hurting herself without realizing it. Sullivan's take: Maybe one can imagine a physical existence where pain does not exist. But not on this planet, where pain has helped organisms survive and prosper, and where suffering has often prodded humankind's spiritual dimension. This complex interaction between good and bad - captured graphically in the…

Quantum Mechanics Is Not Magic, No Matter What Google Ads Says

So, I was checking to see that last night's Baby Blogging post had posted properly, when I noticed something unpleasant in the right column: I recognize that this is the price we pay for being ad-supported, here at ScienceBlogs. It's unreasonable to expect every ad company on the Internet to perfectly screen all their content before serving ads to our blogs, especially given the sheer number of crank ads that are out there. I am within my rights, however, to call out garbage when I see it. Particularly quantum garbage (though I'm no fan of fly-by-night Internet pseudo-universities, either),…

Why Are You Publishing a Comment, Anyway?

I tagged Steinn's post on publishing a comment a few days ago, because I thought it was pretty funny. In the interim, it's been picked up by the usual suspects as more evidence of the need to completely discard the current publishing model in favor of something more blog-like. None of the subsequent discussion has answered what, to me, seems like the most obvious problem with the original story. Namely, why the insistence on publishing this as a Comment in the first place? I mean, here's the start of the saga: 1. Read a paper in the most prestigious journal in your field that "proves" that…

Man Walks on F*&%ing Moon

The Internet has been all abuzz today over the anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. Tor has the best one-stop collection of reminiscences, but there are plenty of others. They're roughly equally split between "Wasn't that the coolest thing ever?" and "Isn't it a shame we stopped going. I was a bit over -2 when the Moon landing happened, so I have no personal recollections to offer. It's a significant enough anniversary for a geek like myself, though, that I wouldn't want it to pass completely without comment. Personally, while I have some sympathy for the laments that we stopped sending…

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Contest Winners

After a long baby-induced delay, we are finally ready to announce the winners of the How to Teach Physics to Your Dog Caption Contest and Poetry Contest. I've obtained a few more copies of the bound galleys from the publisher, so we'll be giving two awards in each contest category: one for each photo, one for Cuttlefish poetry, and one for non-Cuttlefish poetry. And the winners are: Photo 1: The award goes to Nick at #25: Photo 2: The award goes to Eric Goebelbecer at #8: Honorable Mention: Dave W. at #11 and Konrad at #30. Let's ask the judges what they thought: Chad: All three of the…

links for 2009-05-10

The winners of Slate's "Define Baseball in 150 Words" contest. - By John Dickerson - Slate Magazine "Seven guys wait for these other two guys to play catch but this other guy is jealous because he wants to play and so he's trying to stop them with a stick." should've won. (tags: silly sports slate) Manny being woman-y. - By Juliet Lapidos - Slate Magazine "Major League Baseball suspended Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday, after investigators turned up documents suggesting that the slugger was using human chorionic gonadotropin. Typically a fertility drug for women, HCG…

Sports Reported Like Science

the Wall Street Journal, of all places, has a profile of college basketball analyst Bill Raftery and how he prepares to call games. This would be nothing more than Links Dump material, save for the fact that bits of it appear to have been written for the benefit of visiting aliens who have never seen televised basketball before: Over the years, the exercise evolved into the intricate system he uses today. On the far left side of the page, Mr. Raftery writes down each player's name and number. Next are the player's habits and tendencies, as few as three or as many as seven. This season's…

The morning after Judgment Day

I checked out a few of the blogs by the usual suspects this morning, and noticed that the creationists are largely silent (so far, give 'em time) on the Dover documentary from last night…with one exception. The Discovery Institute's Media Complaints Division is wound up over it. They have an eight-point "rebuttal" of the documentary that consists of many picked nits and regurgitated whines, and I thought about taking them on point by point, but then decided it wasn't worth it. For one thing, it's written by Casey Luskin, the DI's small mammal mascot, who is something of an incompetent…

Links for 2011-01-27

The Myth of Charter Schools by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books "If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions. Guggenheim complains that only one in 2,500 teachers loses his or her teaching certificate, but fails to mention that 50 percent of those who enter teaching leave within five years, mostly because of poor working conditions, lack of…

Where I'm Going to Be in 2011

Not an exhaustive list, but since I'm noodling around with my calendar, I might as well note some of the stuff I'll be doing this year: I'll be on a panel about international science testing at the AAAS Annual Meeting in February. This will be a different experience-- not only have I never been to a AAAS meeting before, the whole thing appears to be organized in a different manner than any meeting I have been to. I'm doing a bit of a drive-by for this-- coming in Friday afternoon, leaving Sunday evening-- but I have classes to teach. I've been invited to give a Saturday Morning Science…

Idiotic Football Physics: The Highest Point

Picking on stupid things that sports commentators say is the ultimate "Fish. Barrel. BLAM!" sort of activity, but this morning on the way to drop SteelyKid at day care, Mike and Mike kept repeating one of the absolute dumbest things that football commentators say. They were talking about Larry Fitzgerald of the Arizona Cardinals, and praising his ability as a receiver. In particular, they heaped praise on his ability to "go up and get the ball at its highest point." That would be a pretty neat trick, if he could manage it. A football pass spends a second or two in the air-- let's call it two…

2009: The Year In Blog

It's a new year, so that means it's time to take a look back at the previous year. In graphical form, it looks like this: Clears it all up, doesn't it? That's the past year in blog traffic, showing pageviews per day. Integrate it all up, and it comes to 717,254 pageviews. That's kind of mind-boggling, really. Even more mind-boggling is the fact that there have been 2,465,829 pageviews here since the move to ScienceBlogs in January 2006. So, what drew eyeballs this year? There were a total of 14 posts that drew more than 2,000 pageviews according to Google Analytics. In order, they were: 29,…

Why Every Dog Should Love Quantum Physics 2: Solar Panels

Yesterday's reason to love quantum was the CCD sensor, which relies on the photoelectric effect to take digital pictures. Sticking with the photoelectric theme, today's first quantum-enabled technology is the photovoltaic cell, the basis for solar panels. Photovoltaic cells convert light into electricity, essentially via the same photoelectric effect used in CCD's. A photon of light comes along, and knocks an electron out of some material (typically something silicon-based), and that electron is used to create a current that can power electrical devices. There's some tricky business involved…

Using Molecules to Search for New Physics

I've made a couple of oblique references to this over the past couple of months, but I have an article in the new issue of Physics World, on experiments using molecules to search for an electric dipole moment of the electron: When most of us think about searching for physics beyond the Standard Model - the dominant paradigm of particle physics - the first thing that springs to mind is probably a gigantic particle accelerator like CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Within the collider's 27-km loop, protons slam together at 99.9999991% of the speed of light. Office-building-sized detectors…

Links for 2009-11-18

Zeroth Order Approximation: Summary dismissal "Not every civil court case proceeds to trial. Some are settled "out of court" by the parties involved. Others are settled by the judge in a "summary dismissal" or "summary judgment". The suit is deemed to be unworthy of trial, even without a full hearing. In this way valuable time is saved and litigants are discouraged from bringing frivolous lawsuits. We often do the same thing with ideas. In fact, a great deal of what appears to be debate about ideas actually takes place in a "pre-trial" phase, in which people discuss whether an idea should…

Links for 2009-09-25

The Microhistorical Unknown « Easily Distracted "One thing that frustrates me at times about "big history", world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it's turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of human life, that microhistory contains no surprises or contradictions for the macrohistorian. " (tags: humanities history blogs easily-distracted society culture) Confessions of a Community College Dean: The White Glove Test "I'm thinking it…

links for 2009-04-20

Amazon.com: From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time: Sean Carroll: Books Sure, it looks like a really good book about physics. But where's the talking dog? (tags: science physics books) Built on Facts : Testing 123 "In the physical sciences and physics especially, science follows an infinite loop procedure. I'll label them 1 and 2, though it's really a chicken-and-egg thing. This is the way physics works, simplified: 1. The experimental results produce data which suggest ways old theories could be refined, replaced, or strengthened. 2. The new theoretical…

A wild weekend of godlessness in Minneapolis!

It's another weekend of travel for me. Tonight, I'm off to St Olaf, that fine Lutheran institute of higher learning, to rail against the corruption of science by religion. I'll be speaking at 6 at the Lion's Lair, Buntrock Commons, out there in Northfield, MN (wait…"lion's lair"? Do they mean that literally?) The really exciting news, though, is that the Minnesota Atheists are hosting a talk by Hector Avalos tomorrow afternoon. This is extremely convenient for me — drive in to give a talk, stay and get to listen to another — so yes, I'll be there, too! It's just fun, fun, fun for this lovely…

Mutations in the CFTR gene cause Cystic Fibrosis

So one of the questions on our Neurobiology test due today was to see if there were any heritable diseases in humans that are caused by defects in ion channel genes. I discovered that mutations in the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) gene have been linked to Cystic Fibrosis (CF). CF is a genetic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system of its victims. The defective CFTR gene produces a thick, sticky mucus that provides an environment for life-threatening pathogens to establish an infection, and can clog the lungs. This unusually thick mucus also interferes…

links for 2009-03-07

Michael Faraday, grand unified theorist? (1851) « Skulls in the Stars "The common thread of many of these discoveries is their goal: demonstrating that all the physical forces of nature are but different manifestations of a single, âuniversalâ force. This idea was a surprisingly modern one for Faradayâs time, and is known today as a unified field theory. Such research was likely on the minds of many researchers of that era, however: once Ãrsted discovered that a magnetic compass needle could be deflected by an electric current, the notion that all forces might be related was a…

Mr. Earbrass Writes a Pop-Science Book

Holding TUH not very neatly done up in pink butcher's paper, whcih was all he could find in a last-minute search before leaving to catch his train for London, Mr Earbrass arrives at the offices of his publishers to deliver it. The stairs look oddly menacing, as though he might break a leg on one of them. Suddenly, the whole thing strikes him as very silly, and he thinks he will go and drop his parcel off the Embankment and thus save everyone concerned a good deal of fuss. -- Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel I have just now sent off the (hopefully) final…

Pedagogical Poll: Good Results or Historical Accuracy?

This week's lab (well, half of it-- the class is so big that I have to run two experiments in parallel) is somewhat controversial, so I thought I would throw this out to my wise and worldly readers to see what you all think. The problem is this: we have two different set-ups for doing a photoelectric effect experiment. One of these is a PASCO apparatus with the phototube wired to a circuit inside an actual black box. You shine light into the tube, press a button, and the output of the box rises to the stopping potential for that frequency in a more-or-less exponential manner. This gives very…

The Pharyngula mutating genre meme

I just had an odd idea for another of those blog memes, and this is very much an experiment. It may be too complex to last long, but I just want to toss it out and see if anything interesting happens; it's one where the answers may be interesting in one way, but the structure of the questions might be interesting in another way. Here are the instructions: The Pharyngula mutating genre meme There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out…

Play whack-a-mole with Lee Siegel

You have to read this essay to believe it: Militant atheists are wrong. It's a collection of what I call indignant pieties — "how dare atheists challenge my precious faith!" — and it's also distilled, concentrated, essence of stupid, painful to read and even more agonizing to have to waste time arguing against. But then, it's by Lee Siegel. Lee Siegel. There's a man who has a lot of courage, exposing himself on the internet again. Siegel is the amazing hypocrite who denounced the ethics of the blogosphere, and then cobbled up a sock puppet ( remember "Sprezzatura"?) who went trolling around…

Quest for College

The latest issue of the Cult of the Purple Cow Quarterly-- er, I mean, the Williams Alumni Review has a story about a woman I knew in college (she was a senior when I was a freshman) who has started a non-profit organization called Quest for College, working to help prepare kids for college (annoyingly, the story is only available as a PDF file). The vehicle for this is a board game that she developed: The game board features a student's path through high school, including points that colleges will consider in the application process. Four players or teams roll the die to move along the board…

Laughing my evil laugh at those decadent churches

Lots of people have been sending me links to this NY Times story on churches adopting video games to lure teenagers back to the faith. I am amused. I find the trend to be a very encouraging sign. To get this out of the way: I don't think violent video games make for violent people, so the whole argument that this is not in harmony with the message of the church is silly, to my mind. I also don't see the message of religion as being one of peace, anyway, so even if it did lead to teen violence I wouldn't see any incompatibility with Christianity … just more of the same. I've played Halo ……

FutureBaby Playlist: H-N

Looking at this segment of the playlist, it's clear that I was, consciously or not, giving a good deal of weight to how well a given song works as a sing-along. For whatever reason, this chunk of the artist alphabet is loaded with tunes that are maybe a little dubious content-wise, but good fun to sing along with. "Play the Hits," Hal "Fools By Your Side," Hal "Your Asterisk," The Halo Benders (It's just this side of word salad, but really fun to sing along.) "The World Without Logos," Hellsing (This is word salad, on account of its Japanese origin, but there are few tunes that sound cooler…

Psychiatric Agriculture

I am at a coffee shop in a far away town, and I have things to do.  So I am not going to write about this extensively at the moment.  Still, while looking for something else, I encountered this abstract.  The title was odd enough to get my attention. href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16504418&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Psychiatric agriculture: systemic nutritional modification and mental health in the developing world. Med Hypotheses. 2006;66(6):1234-9. Epub 2006 Feb 28. London DS, Stoll AL…

Ode To Spare Parts

For various reasons, I am now mostly using a computer in the living room, rather than the study.  That is fine, but it is far from the cable modem.  That would be no problem, having a wireless card installed.  But the card is a Linksys card that uses a Broadcom chip.  There is no Linux driver.  I am not clever enough to get the Windows driver to work is Linux using ndiswrapper.  I did get to the point where the OS could see the card, but I could not actually get the card to work.  I'm pretty sure that I was getting hung up on configuring the encryption.  I thought briefly about using it…

Why Ants are Cooler than Flies

Dipterist Keith Bayless exposes a pernicious case of media bias: Six new families of Diptera were described from newly discovered species in the last 6 years! None of these flies received the press coverage given to Martialis. There are a variety of explanations for this, including that 1) The fly descriptions were published in lower profile journals than PNAS 2) Many of the the new fly families evolved more recently than the first ant in the Martialis lineage 3) The level of public and scientific interest in ants inclines them to be better covered or 4) People who study ants are better at…

Negotiating tips

I recently had the privilege of attending a COACh workshop focused on developing the negotiating skills of women STEM faculty, and I highly recommend it and the other workshops they offer. Here are few nuggets I gleaned from the session. Here's a sample dialog between a new faculty member and their chair: "Why do you need fancy piece of equipment X? Can't you just go to nearby university Y and use theirs?" "Umm, I think it will be faster to have it in my own lab and we won't have to travel back and forth so much, so..." "The Dean's not going to like giving such a large startup package."…

Derek Lowe (In The Pipeline) on ghostwriting and a real drug industry project meeting

I know that we have been very fortunate to attract a few new readers over the last year or so. For those, and as a reminder to others, I wanted to focus on some of my major blog influences. One of these is Derek Lowe, an early science blogger who is perhaps the only pharmaceutical company chemist who writes under his own name. Dr Lowe writes the blog, In The Pipeline. Dr Lowe gives invaluable insights into the industry about companies large, small, and tiny, and provides on of the few places where scientists entering the job market can truly get a glimpse of what it's like to work for a…

Cornucopia House Cancer Support Center celebrates its founders

Just a quick reminder of who you're really supporting when you come by and click on this humble blog. It's no secret that joining Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs.com can bring the blogger(s) a very small amount of compensation based upon grades of site traffic - depending on your traffic, this could be about as much as paying for your monthly highspeed internet connection at the house. But over the course of a year, this ends up being more money than I donate personally to my public radio station. Anyway, when I started Terra Sig at the old joint and was invited to join Sb, I was in a…

Over 100,000 served...

...and we thank you. If you look down yonder left, you'll see that my SiteMeter counter passed 100,000 visits earlier today. To be precise, a visitor from the University of Edinburgh's Moray House Institute of Education dialed into ScienceBlogs' 'Last 24 Hours' channel at 2037 GMT and clicked on my post about yesterday's death of Dr Robert Cade, the renal physiologist who formulated Gatorade. (So that readers don't get nervous, SiteMeter doesn't track in any greater detail than that.). So, a great many thanks to my Scottish reader for being #100,000. If I knew who you were and could be…

Complementary medicine at Australian infertility clinics

As cited by news services and the original source yesterday, In a survey of 97 new patients being seen at an infertility clinic, reported in the Australia & New Zealand Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology [April 2007 issue], Stankiewicz and colleagues discovered that two-thirds reported using complementary medicine. Nearly half of them said they had consulted with a complementary therapy provider, such as a chiropractor, acupuncturist, or naturopath. Over three-quarters of the patients reported taking over-the-counter multivitamins, and about a quarter to one-third used herbal remedies…

Rats check their own knowledge before taking a test

Animals often show a keen intelligence and many species, from octopuses to crows, can perform problem-solving tasks. But humans are thought to go one step further. We can reflect on our own thoughts and we have knowledge about our knowledge. We can not only solve problems, but we know in advance if we can (or are likely to). In technical terms, this ability is known as 'metacognition'. It's what students do when they predict how well they will do in an exam when they see the questions. It's what builders do when they work out how long a job will take them to finish. But can animals do…

What's my poison? Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author, professor Deborah Blum

This is going to be a quick welcome to Deborah Blum (@deborahblum) who has just moved her blog, Speakeasy Science, to ScienceBlogs. Why quick? Because I am only 22 pages away from finishing her latest book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. This engaging tale of the race of science and medicine against chemical poisonings for profit and punishment features the true story of NYC chief medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler. Of course, the other actors are arsenic, methanol, chloroform, thallium, and radium,…

HudsonAlpha investigators to teach UAHunstville classes

As I wrote on Twitter yesterday, I am sending hugs, salutes, and immense respect to Dr. Chris Gunter and her colleagues at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Alabama. Gunter, a self-described "recovering Nature editor" who serves as Director of Research Affairs at HudsonAlpha, is working with several of her colleagues at the institute to finish teaching an undergraduate neuroscience course that was left without a professor following the UAHuntsville tragedy. Practical things first: Chris has sent out a call to any educators out there who have syllabi or slides for…

Revealing clientele

Bill Nye the Science Guy, humanist of the year, science educator and entertainer, and all-around interesting fellow, apparently stopped briefly at the Creation "Museum" to take a quick picture of the exterior, and then moved on. How do we know? Ken Ham was watching. Bill Nye ("The Science Guy" of PBS-TV fame) visited the Creation Museum for...... 2 minutes this past week. He only stopped in front of the museum to take photos. In our photo attached, he is standing in the driveway in front of the museum. He did not go inside. Including the drive in and out the gate, he was on-site for a total…

What's in a name (frame)? Describing the climate thing

The New York Times' Andrew Revkin asks in his latest Dot Earth blog post if there might be "more effective ways to describe human-caused global warming." The problem with "global warming," he says, has been summed up by Seth Godin thusly: The muted reaction to our impending disaster comes down to two things: 1. the name. Global is good. Warm is good. Even greenhouses are good places. How can "global warming" be bad? I'm not being facetious. If the problem were called "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death" the entire conversation would be framed in a different way. Neither of those…

Bad news from Antarctica

Hot on the heels of the good news that the deep ocean conveyor doesn't appear to be on the verge of shutting down -- a scenario that would have eliminated many of the world's most important fisheries among other things -- comes the inevitable flipside bad news. The Southern Ocean has stopped absorbing carbon dioxide. Guess the honeymoon is over. Just about every climate model includes the assumption that a good portion of all that CO2 we're pumping into the atmosphere will be absorbed by the oceans, and the Southern Ocean in particular. So in addition to forcing the climatologists back to…

Why does anyone pay attention to this guy?

I'm talking about Alister McGrath, the author of the unbelievably weak polemic The Twilight of Atheism, who has resurfaced to take on his nemesis, Richard Dawkins. Jason does a good job dismantling McGrath's pathetic review of the Dawkins' The God Delusion, so all I'm going to do is posit that the editorial standards for people of faith are substantially lower than that for experts of most other fields of expertise. I was asked to review McGrath's Twilight of Atheism a few years back for a magazine in Vancouver. I didn't get paid much for the reviews, but the editor only wanted 150 words, so…

Mechanics of Heat

One of the last things we cover in Physics 201 is heat. You all know what heat is: the atoms in a substance jiggle around or fly around freely if the substance happens to be a gas. Like all moving massive objects, these atoms have a certain kinetic energy. Now the problem is that they're all constantly moving and crashing into each other, exchanging energy back and forth. It's hard enough to keep track of the energy exchange between two colliding objects (trust me!), much less a trillion trillion of them. So we treat them as a statistical ensemble and just look at the average energy.…

Michigan v. Michigan State: An Early Season Match-Up

This post written by guest blogger Jody Roberts.* What, you say, how can this be? What could Michigan and Michigan St. possibly be battling over in the middle of summer? No, it's not preseason football; it's not even sport fishing. The battle today, my friends (as highlighted here in The Ann Arbor News and here on UM's website), is about organic farming. So, in some sense we have a double header: organic farming vs. 'conventional' farming and Michigan vs. Michigan State. At issue: just how competitive is organic farming compared to petroleum-based farming? Well, according to a new study by…

Getting reagents into Africa: Any tricks and tips?

As mentioned earlier, I'll be heading off to Africa soon to do some experiments and teach a workshop. One of the more interesting challenges, we face from the get go, is how to deliver the reagents in a manner so that we can ensure their arrival, and also worry less about things like stability of the reagents themselves (i.e. can we keep the stuff cold, and how long will it take to get there). It's funny, but most people who do this sort of thing simply tell me that the best way is to take it as one of your carry on luggage, and (I quote) "hope for the best." The reasons for this are…

SHOWDOWN UPDATE: "Particle Beats General Relativity, But Questions Remain"

PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS Whuh? Dot? Speck? Wet? Triangle Foe? Nobody knows, but for his triumph over General Relativity Stately, plump Particle walked off the court that night, victorious, triumphant. There was a dragon slayer on the loose, yes, there was a dragon slayer. And it was him. Despite odds makers giving General Relativity healthy, spacious, easy 5-1 odds, Particle had come out on top. Somehow, crawling from the depths of this near mythical tournament, Particle had climbed to the top of the mountain. The crowd quickly gendered this subatomic feature, dubbing it…

The Ethical Imagination.

Last week, I managed to catch one of last year's Massey lectures on the radio. These are basically a high profile lecture series that is sponsored by both the CBC and the House of Anansi Press. In essense, they usually involve a prominent Canadian cogniscenti who attempts to cover a topic pertinent in the realm of citizenship at both the Canadian and, indeed, the global level. The 2006 series was authored by Margaret Somerville, a noted ethicist out of Montreal, and the byline of the accompanying book reads: What does it mean to be human today, when mind-altering scientific breakthroughs…