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That's not a heart! It's a flailing Engine of Destruction!

My day began well enough. I'd gotten up early, got some writing done, and was headed into the office to do some prep work for classes, which start this week. My phone rang just as I had my key in the office door — which was cutting it close. My office is an AT&T dead zone, and a few more seconds and I would have been in blissful obliviousness for the rest of the day. It was my doctor's assistant. I will paraphrase her words slightly. "We just got the results of your tests from last week. Your heart is a shriveled black lump starved of charity, decency, charm, and kindness," she said, "…

Back to The Beginning

Politics aside, one aspect of Hillary's speech last Friday really resonated with me. She describes the feeling of looking up at the night sky for Sputnik as a young girl: And my memory of that, of peering into the sky in our backyard in a suburb of Chicago, I don't think we ever saw it although my friends claim that they had seen it, was so exciting that somehow we were connected to what that meant. And it was not only a thrill for a young girl, but it really did start me thinking. I expect many of us have experienced that very same rush as children because we humans are born naturally…

...but We ALL Knew Katrina Was Coming!

In January of 2003, I sat in Joe Kelley's seminar at the University of Maine as he foretold the devastation that was to come to New Orleans. I'd never heard this chilling story before and listened intently as he explained that as far back as when The Big Easy flooded in the 1920's, scientists realized that the Mississippi Delta would continue to change its course (rivers have a habit of doing that you see). I began to understand that over time, the already vulnerable city faced increasing threat and felt dizzy amid the whirlwind of so many alarming facts and figures. The levees are…

Hey, gang! Let's put on a show!

I'm going to be participating in an internet show this weekend to raise money for charity — Doctors without Borders. It's going to be going on on BlogTV Saturday and Sunday (I'll only be on for an hour early Sunday morning), with a lot of interesting people like James Randi and Matt Dillahunty in an interactive format — ask us questions, and maybe we'll answer. Here's all the information you need. It isn't required, but remember…the purpose is to encourage donations to an excellent charity. This video can be downloaded from here;http://www.mediafire.com/?fvv4bf2ssvk...Please feel free to…

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum In the first installment of Intersection-ing sans Chris, I've decided to address all this hullabaloo on Global Warming.. Is it real? More and more, scientists are criticized as alarmists jumping on the apocalyptic panic bandwagon while the rest of us have more important things to worry about. War, growing national debt, nuclear proliferation, and K-Fed's attempt at a hiphop career to name a few. So how dramatically has the state of the world shifted since humans came onto the scene? Can it be we just have an ego problem - bragging our species has had a…

Training in working memory can improve preschoolers' performance in a variety of tasks

There's been a ton of research on the impact of working memory: its importance in learning, its effect on math skills, and its relationship to other mental abilities. Yesterday's entry on The Wild Side discusses working memory's relationship with IQ. It's been shown that adults can improve working memory with training, and training has even been shown to work for kids as young as seven. There are clearly tremendous benefits to working memory (and at least one down side). A related mental function, inhibitory control, is also a key to many cognitive abilities. But if working memory training…

Book Progress #36

After a lot of work, I finally got to covering what happened during the 1960's and 1970's in the bird evolution chapter. There are basically three phases that dominate the section; 1860-1926, 1968-1980, and the explosion of research spurred by the discovery of feathered non-avian dinosaurs. The first two sucked up quite a bit of my time, and I spent most of the weekend digging for material to revise the notion that paleontologists thought dinosaurs were just "big lizards" prior to the discovery of Deinonychus. Indeed, even in 1946 there were suggestions that dinosaurs were so successful…

Genetic Testing for Antidepressant Medication Response

Roche Molecular Diagnostics offers a test that can determine which type of genes a person has for enzymes that metabolize antidepressant medication.  The test costs $ 300 to $400, and can be ordered by healthcare professionals, or by consumers. The idea is that it might be possible to predict which medications might be better for a particular patient.  That has appeal, because many people have to try more than one medication in the quest to find one that is both tolerable and effective. If a person metabolizes a drug much more rapidly than most people, then that person might need a higher…

Brain Links

BMC Psychiatry, an open-access journal, has an article on href="http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/index.shtml" rel="tag">Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/7/56/abstract">Altered oscillatory brain dynamics after repeated traumatic stress.  This is yet another indication that PTSD has an enduring physiological basis.   The insula, as a site of multimodal convergence, could play a key role in understanding the pathophysiology of PTSD, possibly accounting for what has been called posttraumatic…

Telling Stories in Class

In my upper level course this semester, I am really trying to interject personality into the lectures and discussions. By personality, I don't (just) mean humor and compassion. What I also mean is that I am trying to convey that our subject matter is an area of active research, done by (gasp!) real people. I started the term by giving the "old white guy tour," summarizing the historical development of the field and some of the key figures that have contributed. I called it the "old white guy tour" which at least got a smile from one or two of my students. I wanted to acknowledge that I was…

More on microfluidics

Yesterday I wrote about the use of microfluidics chips for imaging neuronal activity and the behaviour correlated with it in the nematode worm C. elegans, without going into too much detail about exactly what microfluidics is. Microfluidics is a multidisciplinary field - a combination of chemistry, physics, engineering and biotechnology - which involves the manufacture of devices that contain sub-millimeter-sized channels and which can be used to control the movements of miniscule amounts of fluids (nano-, or even picoliters). Starting in the 1990s, microfluidics began to revolutionize…

Repost: The Story of Alex

This is a repost from July of 2006. I thought it was appropriate, given Alex's passing. Please check out Friday Grey Matters in my archives for many more reports on Dr. Pepperberg's work with Alex. Alex is a 28-year-old African Grey parrot who lives in the lab of Irene Pepperberg, in Brandeis University, and is the eqivalent of a superstar in the bird world. Long ago, Dr. Pepperberg chose Alex at a pet store as neither an exceptional nor sub-par bird. Through the years, Dr. Pepperberg has engaged Alex in a complex form of communication, where, much like a parent teaching a child, Alex is…

DonorsChoose Challenge Update: Give 'til it hurts you win!

Okay - it's halfway through the DonorsChoose challenge, and we need to do better. We still have several great projects left to fund. Luckily, our SEED overlords have decided to reward you for giving - not that helping kids learn isn't reward enough, but an iPod would be nice, wouldn't it? So, Seed will be giving away Seed mag subscriptions and an assortment of mugs, laptop covers and USB drives each Friday from now until the end of October. In addition, there will be one 'grand prize' at the end of the drive: an iPod Touch! All you have to do to enter is: 1) give to one of our DonorsChoose…

Beauty and the Detroit Auto Show 2007

So, I went to the Detroit Auto Show last night, which was awesome! The Auto Show is perhaps one of the coolest things about living near Detroit (and there's not many), so I usually try to go during the two weeks its open to the public. I'm a big car enthusiast, and while that interest is 99% geared towards car manufactured pre-1970, that other 1% keeps me drooling over the chromiest, vroomist rides the big D has to offer. Now, when I walk into the show, the first thing on my mind is "Ok, where's the Mustangs??" I usually make a beeline for the Ford setup, giggle and clap my hands over the…

Whites-Only Scholarship as "Reverse Affirmative Action"

In an effort to "encourage discussion" on race-based scholarships, a student group called the Boston University College Republicans (BUCR) has instituted a controversial $250 "Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship". Applicants must be at least 25% Caucasian, have a 3.2 GPA, and submit an essay on what it means to be a Caucasian-American in today's society. BUCR argues that scholarships that are preferentially given to members of a certain race, and excluding others, are a form of bigotry no matter which way the discrimination swings. By their own definition, this scholarship is…

The 90th Anniversary of the Somme

It would be fair to say that I am obsessed with all things related to the first world war. I would be neglecting my own obsession, then, if I didn't mark the 90th anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme. For those of you who don't know, The Battle of the Somme began with a British offensive designed to capture areas around the River of the Somme that had been held by German forces since 1914. In preparation for the battle, British forces had dug tunnels under the German trenches and laid huge mines there. After a prolonged artillery barage, the mines were detonated at 7:30 am,…

Cool Visual Illusions: Depth Inversion

As you all know, I love visual illusions, and this may be one of my favorites. This picture is pretty small (go here for a bigger version), but you should be able to figure out what's going on by watching it for a moment. Notice that as the face flips over, you briefly see the concave surface of the back or inside of the mask, but it quickly switches back to a convex, upside-down mask. That's not because the image changes, though. Instead, your brain decides that faces can't be hollow, so it changes it for you. This is called depth inversion, or the "hollow face illusion." Interestingly,…

Do Sweet Smells Make Pain More Tolerable?

Apparently so. Recent research has shown that pleasant smells can increase pain tolerance, and a recent paper by Prescott and Wilkie(1) suggests that it is specifically sweet smells that do so. I'll just skip to the experiment, and spare you the background, because the experiment contains all you need to know. They started with three types of smells: sweet and pleasant (caramel), unsweet and pleasant (after shave), and unpleasant (civet musk, which I hear smells awful). The inclusion of both sweet and unsweet pleasant smells allowed Prescott and Wilkie to distinguish between the analgesic…

The Next Andruw Jones

I have to do a little fatherly bragging. My son (#3) started playing baseball this year. He's 9, so he's starting a bit later -- much later than almost all of the players in his league. So he's got some catching up to do. Yesterday, I went to his first game. That's him out there in right field (you can barely see him). Right field is where they stick the least experienced player, of course, because in the 8-10 year old league, no one hits the ball to right. In fact, in the entire game, only 4 balls were hit into the outfield, and all 4 were hit by his team. So he didn't see any action on…

Role Reversal is Psychiatric Art

There have been many collections and compendia of artistic works by persons with psychiatric illness.  They are interesting.  In fact, it was a chance encounter with such a book that first got me interested in psychology. Thre is a story there, which I won't tell here, other than to say that it is a good argument for supporting public libraries.  Bored teenagers in a new town are better off in a library than in other places they might end up. Anyway, now I encounter the art-psychiatry connection again, but with a twist.  Rather that art produced by the patient, it is art produced by a…

Women in the U.S. too tired for sex

At least that is what the headline says.  Of course the article is not really about sex; the sex part is only a small part of the findings of the study.  But headline writers know how to get attention.  What is really striking to me about this report is not that it shows that sleep problems impair a person's sex life, but that sleep problems contribute to many risk factors for mood disorders.  It is not one of the conclusions of the study, at least as reported in the summary.  But it is rather worrisome, to me at least. Major depression is a serious problem; it is, in fact, one of the…

Effect of Night-Shift Nap on ER Residents and Nurses

This is another one of those studies that shows pretty much what you would expect.  There are some surprises, though: href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/EmergencyMedicine/EmergencyMedicine/tb/4434">Night-Shift Nap Awakens ER Residents and Nurses By Judith Groch, Senior Writer, MedPage Today November 03, 2006 STANFORD, Calif., Nov. 3 -- Allowed a 40-minute nap midway through 12-hour night shifts, emergency room residents and nurses responded with more vigilance and vigor, found researchers here. Nevertheless, the randomized study that compared nappers with non-nappers working the…

What I taught today: those oddball critters, the vertebrates

My students are also blogging here: My undergrad encounters Developmental Biology Miles' Devo Blog Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology Thang’s Blog Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology Chelsae blog Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology Thoughts of Developmental Biology Biology~ We've been talking about flies nonstop for the last month — it's been nothing but developmental genetics and epistasis and gene regulation in weird ol' Drosophila — so I'm changing things up a bit, starting today. We talked about vertebrates in a general way, giving an…

Jeffrey Sachs on our ever diminishing resources

I heard Sachs being interviewed in the latest Nature Podcast. Oliver Morton: I think one of the striking things, Jeff that you say very early on in [your new book, 'Commonwealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet'] is that the great crisis point is that we have a unified global economy and a divided global society and well as the big question is how can we use the first of those things to fix the second? Jeffrey Sachs: I think the key is better understanding of the unique situation we find ourselves in. The world is now so crowded. The extent of resource use is so remarkable and unprecedented…

Life and Information

John Wilikins has a post on my last couple of entries: In a couple of posts, Scibling Alex Palazzo of The Daily Transcript has given two quite distinct views of what biology is about: information, and mechanism. In the first he argues that what is needed to build organisms is information, and in the second that biology is about machines, things that do work. I want to say that he is wrong about the first and right about the second, and moreover that they are contradictory ways of looking at the living world. So why does Wilkins have a problem with a discussion equating information with life?…

Back from the wilderness

What a great day. The grant is done and now I can get back to the bench after about one month of tapping away at the keyboard. Writing a K99, which uses the same format as an R01 (or the main NIH grant) plus a wee-bit more, is quite an experience. Putting together a scientific manuscript for a journal is easy, all the data is at hand and your task is to convey to the reader the logic of the experiments and the implications of your results. But writing a grant is ... much harder. In the methods, you've got to plan ahead in some coherent logical way. You've got to project the pitfalls, you've…

Cold fibres: neurochemistry & anatomy

[Introduction|Part 2] Takashima et al (2007) carried out one of the first investigations of the distribution of TRPM8-positive sensory nerve terminals in various peripheral structures, using transgenic mice which express enhanced green fluorescent protein under the control of the TRPM8 transcriptional promoter. First, they confirmed that the transgene expression was neuron-specific, by showing that cultured DRG and TG neurons from the transgenic animals expressed both GFP and the pan-neuronal marker PGP-9.5. The correspondence of GFP and PGP-9.5 coexpression with TRPM8 immunoreactivity…

Explorers & Crusaders

I'm in Italia. Here's one of my favorite entries. It first appeared last year. You can clearly divide scientists into two categories, those who build new models and those who prove old models. The explorers and the crusaders. Usually the former are seeking the truth, or something close to it, while the latter are trying to confirm their own theories as if the idea was more important than reality. As you can guess, I do not have a high regard for the latter group. Unfortunately there are a lot of crusaders around. In some way we all are part of this second group to some extent, but…

How auxin works (with a little help from IP6)

Monday I saw an incredible lecture by U. Wash's Ning Zheng. (Yes Bil, I actually enjoyed a structure biology talk!) I'll just summarize Dr. Zheng's last paper that was on the cover of the April 5th edition of Nature. Intense studies on phototaxis in plants that began in part by Darwin (yup, that's right) led to the discovery of auxin, a diffusible signal that stimulates growth in plant cells. How do cells sense the growth factor? No one could identify the receptor until recently. It was known that auxin treatment promoted the degradation of the Aux/IAA transcription silencer, a protein that…

Only a bird

Another feathered dinosaur has been found in China, prompting Ken Ham to dig in his heels and issue denials. Yet another supposed “feathered dinosaur” fossil has come to light, again in China. (Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, AiG–U.S., reported on another Chinese fossil of a supposed feathered dinosaur in April 2012) Now, one headline described the fossil as “almost birdlike,” and the authors of the report in Nature Communications note many features the fossil shares with living birds, particularly those that live on the ground. In fact, Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell and Dr. David Menton (AiG–U.S.) both…

Different types of signal sequences?

Apparently weak and strong signal sequences are differentially targeted to the ER acording to a new paper in Cell. (For more on how proteins are inserted into the ER click here.) Preprolactin has a strong signal sequence and is inserted into the translocon even when the unfolded protein response (UPR) is activated. Prion protein, which has a weak signal sequence, is only inserted when UPR is inactive. Remember that under stress (high heat or other nasty conditions) cells rewire protein production and turn off the insertion of most proteins into the ER while upregulating the production and…

mRNA expression in mammalian cells

Newest from PLoS Biology: Raj A, Peskin CS, Tranchina D, Vargas DY, Tyagi S Stochastic mRNA Synthesis in Mammalian Cells. PLoS Biol (2006) 4(10): e309 The authors genomically incorporated a gene with 32 tandem copies of a 43-base-pair probe-binding sequence at the 3â² end of a coding sequence for a fluorescent protein into CHO (chinese hamster overy) cells and probed fixed cells with fluorescent oligos (in other words they used FISH). The high signal (32 oligos/transcript) allowed the group to see individual mRNAs. The incorporated gene was under an inducible promoter. What did they find?…

Best of the Abyss and DSN: The Judges

2007 at DSN...Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. For 2008...Work It Harder, Make It Better, Do It Faster, which will Make Us Stronger. As usual as the end of year comes up I get a bit weepy and nostalgic. During this time I send Peter an email harassing him to produce the Best of DSN and Best of the Abyss. Peter this year gently reminded me it was my turn. This year I trekked around the globe and found experts in many fields to find the best of 2007. Well...actually I spent a half-hour emailing people I actually thought I could sucker into this. The judges are hodgepodge of internet semi…

Neighbor kids, ergot, and zombies.

My better half was clearing plates from the kitchen table as I was cooking something. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Hey, I thought our kids like zucchini bread. Dr. Free-Ride: They do. That piece was [the kid across the street's] -- always gladly accepts a snack, never has more than a few bites. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Huh. Dr. Free-Ride: I think that's why when our kids are over there, there are so many snacks. If you have a kid who only eats a little at a time, you have to feed continuously. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Why don't our kids eat like birds? Dr. Free-Ride: I'm going to…

Strategies for grading fairly.

I am in grading Hell. I expect to be here until at least Memorial Day (Monday), and possibly through Tuesday. (Does that mean I'm actually in grading Purgatory? Please advise.) Anyway, in a private communication, PhysioProf asked, As you get grumpier from grading, do you grade harsher? If I did, that would be an unfortunate situation for those whose papers I get to last, wouldn't it? Thankfully for my students, I make serious efforts to apply a uniform level of harshness (or leniency) across the whole pool I'm grading. Here are some of my strategies: Invest some time in formulating…

Friday Sprog Blogging: matter matters we need to pursue.

The Free-Ride offspring are magnets for questions not easily answered in the framework of the grade school science curriculum. This means, I think, that the Free-Ride parents are going to have to work out some age-appropriate ways to offer explanations. And I have a feeling my molecular model kit is only going to take us so far. For example: What's the deal with dry ice? As Hallowe'en approaches, the Free-Ride offspring make more frequent encounters with plastic cauldrons spilling over with spooky vapors. They know that what produces those vapors is called "dry ice", but what exactly is…

Priests and their evil ways

It's odd, but several of the major sex abuse cases involving the Catholic church involve deaf kids. I didn't understand why, until I heard this song. And now I have to get some q-tips and sulfuric acid and scrub out my ears. For a not-quite-so entertaining story, read this account of Father Oliver O'Grady, a despicable monster who committed all kinds of depravities. O'Grady has admitted abusing many children of various ages, boys and girls, and said he slept with two mothers to get access to their children. He was convicted of child sexual abuse in 1993 and spent seven years in prison. Now…

The best graduate (chemistry) writing assignment ever.

As part of my graduate coursework in chemistry, I took a biophysical chemistry course from Professor Wray Huestis -- not because my research was in biophysical chemistry, but because I was curious. Possibly my best move ever in choosing my classes, since she gave us one of the smartest and most useful writing assignments I've ever encountered. The task was to write a proposal for a novel piece of research in biophysical chemistry. To start, you had to read around to figure out what the outstanding problems were. You also had to read around to get a sense of what kinds of experimental…

Mendeleev rips off French geologist?

The New York Times has taken notice of the history and philosophy of chemistry in a small piece about a new book, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Significance by Eric R. Scerri. In particular, the Times piece notes the issue of whether Dimitri Ivanovich Mendeleev was "borrowing" from the work of others (without acknowledging that he had done so) when he put forward his version of the periodic table of the elements: The first [of six scientists who formulated periodic tables before Mendeleev] was a French geologist named Alexandre Emile Béguyer de Chancourtois, but his publisher was…

Friday Sprog Blogging: a forceful film.

The elder Free-Ride offspring has been learning about forces ("pushes and pulls") in second grade science class. Meanwhile, at home both the sprogs found a new favorite film, The Way Things Go. It's about 30 minutes of nearly continuous Rube Goldberg machinery. There are a few visible cuts in the film, which seem to be pauses to let chemical reactions proceed (although it would be completely understandable to me if cuts had been required to get some of the more complicated mechanical interactions to work). The progress of the apparatus is presented without narration, which is just as…

Friday Sprog Blogging: take a breath.

The elder Free-Ride offspring had a bit of a meltdown after dinner. Witness the calming effects of science: Dr. Free-Ride's better half: (To sobbing elder offspring) Taking some deep breaths might help you calm down. Younger offspring: Do we breathe carbon dioxide? Dr. Free-Ride's better half: No, we don't. Plants breathe carbon dioxide. Elder offspring: (Still crying) We breathe air. Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Yes. Do you know what it is in the air that we breathe? I think they mention its name in your Yoga Kids video. Elder offspring: (Sniffling just a little) Oxygen? Dr. Free-…

The Stem Cell Debate of 2007

So we lost the stem cell battle this year. Moral self-righteousness once again defeated pragmatic common sense. Of course, important political progress was made: Congress supported science, and Bush was forced to veto a popular bill. So what should we do next year? I think one important argument for the pro-stem cell side was missing from this debate. If Bush and Brownback are really serious about preventing "immoral" embryo research, then it's now clear that the federal government must become involved. Back in August 2001, when Bush originally proposed his stem cell "compromise," he assumed…

Collegiality matters.

Abel has a thoughtful post on the horrific faculty meeting shooting at University of Alabama Huntsville this past Friday. New information seems to come out every few hours on the shooter, Dr. Amy Bishop, a biologist at the university who had been denied tenure, and I'm nowhere near ready to weigh in on the particulars of the case (at least, not with anything smarter than my viscera). But I do want to say just a little on a pair of questions Abel posed in his post: Do you think that lack of collegiality is grounds for denial of tenure for a candidate that otherwise meets the basic…

A bad way to use your officially sanctioned cheat-sheet on an exam.

I am, as it happens, done grading. But I need to express my concern (OK, bumfuzzlement) about something I saw quite a lot of on the final exams I was grading. You may recall that I let my students prepare a single page of notes (8.5" by 11", front and back) that they can use to help them on their exam. Sadly, not all uses of such an officially sanctioned cheat-sheet end up being helpful. Imagine the following exam question, which the students are asked to answer in a few sentences: Give van Fraassen's definition of "observable". Then, using this definition, classify each of the following…

If there were a god, he'd make Deepak Chopra shut up

This has been really tiresome. Deepak Chopra's endless string of ignorance is simply wearing me down, but he has declared that he has made his last post on The God Delusion. I'm sure, though, that he'll find other things to babble about. In this one, he claims he's going to deal with objections that people have brought up to his previous inanity; he doesn't, really, and the few things he does choose to highlight expose the fact that he hasn't been listening to the criticisms. He only makes four rather incoherent points. Chopra has claimed that Dawkins believes in a purely random universe,…

In which the NCCIH is questioned...

Orac's vacation continues apace. Well, not quite. The main reason I'm in London right now is because I was invited to give an actual scientific (as opposed to skeptical) talk at a conference about—of all things—ion channels in cancer. That's where I am right now, at the Sir Alexander Fleming Building at Imperial College London, and that's where I'll be all day today and much of tomorrow. Having been invited, I decided to make a vacation of it. Basically, it's a big science sandwich, with two science days in the middle of two slices of vacation bread. I would also be lying if I didn't admit to…

A query from the mailbag

A reader sent me a mild ethical problem, and asked that I put it up to get reader input. This isn't a life-or-death sort of situation, but the kind of low-level, day-to-day aggravation with which we're all familiar. Today I went to get my car inspected as my state requires it annually, and you will get a ticket for having an expired inspection sticker. The inspection place I went to had a Christian radio station in the waiting room. I politely asked the guy at the desk (who I later confirmed was the owner) to change the channel to one that was not religious. He said he would not. I…

Michele Bachmann for President I

Michele Bachmann is my home-girl. has lived in a nearby town for years, represented a nearby community in the Minnesota State Senate. I had one of her kids in my class at the U. And she's the US Congressperson for the district that is just a few short blocks from where I live now . In many ways, therefore, she has been a part of my life for a long time. And, now that Michele is officially running for President of the United States of America, I thought I'd repost some of the material on this blog written about her or her activities. Instead of producing a new copy of each post, I'll…

Gay Judges should NOT be allowed to rule on Gay Laws

I agree that a gay judge should not rule on a gay marriage issue. He's biased. He's gay, and in a gay relationship and will therefore be biased in favor of gay rights. Of course, non-gay judges should never be allowed to rule on issues of straight marriage or other private matters, legislatures should not be allowed to introduce legislation limiting or proscribing behavior related to gayosity or straightosity related to anyone like themselves, and voters should never, ever be allowed to vote on things that have anything to do with individual relationships, sexual behavior, sexuality, or…

Eagleton vs. Dawkins

You should only read Terry Eagleton's review of The God Delusion if you enjoy the spectacle of "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching." That's the title of the review, but I think it's more a description of the contents. You can get the gist from just the first paragraph. Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one…