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Graph Contraction and Minors

Another useful concept in simple graph theory is *contraction* and its result, *minors* of graphs. The idea is that there are several ways of simplifying a graph in order to study its properties: cutting edges, removing vertices, and decomposing a graph are all methods we've seen before. Contraction is a different technique that works by *merging* vertices, rather than removing them. Here's how contraction works. Suppose you have a graph G. Pick a pair of vertices v and w which are adjacent in G. You can create a graph G' which is a contraction of G by replacing v and w with a *single*…

Surreal Numbers and Normal Forms

On the way to figuring out how to do sign-expanded forms of infinite and infinitesimal numbers, we need to look at yet another way of writing surreals that have infinite or infinitesimal parts. This new notation is called the normal form of a surreal number, and what it does is create a canonical notation that separates the parts of a number that fit into different commensurate classes. What we're trying to capture here is the idea that a number can have multiple parts that are separated by exponents of ω. For example, think of a number like (3ω+π): it's not equal to 3ω; but there's no real…

Bonadonna's Diplodocus

Davide Bonadonna kindly sent on these pictures of a Diplodocus model he produced (with assistance provided by Simone Maganuco) during Summer 2009 for the Capellini Museum in Bologna. 2009 was the centenary year for the installation of the museum's Diplodocus carnegii replica skeleton: as I'm sure you know, it's one of eight D. carnegii casts sent around the world by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Why send the cast to Bologna, and not Rome, Milan, Florence, or Naples? For the answer, look at the document here. You'll note that the model had a wide, rectangular muzzle. This is absolutely…

Bora's Links on (Science) Journalism

Just a collection of links to my and other people's posts/articles I need to have collected all in one place (I will explain later): 1.a.Breaking News Scientific American Editor, President to Step Down; 5 Percent of Staff Cut 'Scientific American' Editor Out in Reorg 1. b.Death of print: how are newspapers and magazines different? Defining the Journalism vs. Blogging Debate, with a Science Reporting angle Rosen's Flying Seminar In The Future of News Thinking the Unthinkable 2020 vision: What's next for news Newspapers on the brink-where to next? Could beautiful design save newspapers…

How to Blog?

Slate has this good article with the same title (yes, read it if you are interested in becoming or becoming a better blogger). I agree with everything in it, except for one piece of advice that I often see bandied about but think is totally wrong: Don't be too wordy. HuffPo says that 800 words is the outer-length limit for a blog post; anything longer will turn people off. No. No. No. This feeds nicely in what Ezra Klein wrote about it: The specialized posts mix with the generalized posts -- in my case, health wonkery rubs elbows with garden variety political punditry -- and the two cross-…

'We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process.'

Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship: The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing: Abstract: "Academic libraries cannot pay the regularly escalating subscription prices for scholarly journals. These libraries face a crisis that has continued for many years revealing a commercial system that supports a business model that has become unsustainable. This paper examines the "serials crisis," as it has come to be known, and the economics of the academic journal…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: If I Were You: Perceptual Illusion of Body Swapping: The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this…

Sleep News

Children With Sleep Disorder Symptoms Are More Likely To Have Trouble Academically: Students with symptoms of sleep disorders are more likely to receive bad grades in classes such as math, reading and writing than peers without symptoms of sleep disorders, according to recent research. Slow Wave Activity During Sleep Is Lower In African-Americans Than Caucasians: Slow wave activity (SWA), a stable trait dependent marker of the intensity of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, is lower in young healthy African-Americans compared to Caucasians who were matched for age, gender and body weight,…

Carnival of the Liberals #39

Well, it's been a while.... since I hosted the CotL #3 about a year and a half ago. It's ripe time to do it again. Not that it was ever easy to choose ten best written and most creative posts out of dozens of great entries! I spent the last few days agonizing and wishing I could include 20 or 30 or 40...but rules are rules, so here it goes, the brand new Carnival of the Liberals: The Ridger of The Greenbelt digs for deeper causes in Not slavery - abolition: Upsetting tyrants is noble, isn't it? Charles H. Green knows that Trust Matters and right now you should trust me that his post is well…

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (Student Bloggers)

There are 85 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 106 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time. Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD student studying hearing (more precisely hair cell regeneration in the cochlea) at the…

Lice Provide Clues to Evolution of Humans

Scientists believe they have figured out how and why the human pubic louse, right, and the gorilla louse, left, diverged 3.3 million years ago. Unlike most other primates, which play host to only one species of louse, humans provide a home to three species of lice. Even more interesting, the closest relative of the human pubic louse is the gorilla louse. Each of these three species of human louse occupy a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives among the fine hairs on the scalp as its name implies. Its cousin, the body louse, doesn't live on the body,…

That Double Standard Regarding Anger

Finally, a study will be published that documents what we all have known ever since women entered the workforce: men are admired and are financially rewarded for getting angry at work, whereas women who get angry at work are financially penalized and generally viewed as incompetent. This research, conducted by Victoria Brescoll, who is a post-doctoral scholar at Yale University, will be presented at this weekend's annual meeting of the research and teaching organization, Academy of Management. To do this research, Brescoll had her study participants watch videos of men and women job…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 22 new articles in PLoS ONE today. I think these are the most interesting (to me) and perhaps most bloggable: High Natality Rates of Endangered Steller Sea Lions in Kenai Fjords, Alaska and Perceptions of Population Status in the Gulf of Alaska: Steller sea lions experienced a dramatic population collapse of more than 80% in the late 1970s through the 1990s across their western range in Alaska. One of several competing hypotheses about the cause holds that reduced female reproductive rates (natality) substantively contributed to the decline and continue to limit recovery in the…

Frank Schaeffer: Not good enough

Frank Schaeffer, who with his father was one of the aggressive peddlers of anti-choice ideas, has commendably accepted part of the blame for the Tiller murder, admitting that he and his kind contributed to the atmosphere of hate. Unfortunately, he fails with this bit in the middle. Contributing to an extreme and sometimes violent climate has not only been the fault of the antiabortion crusaders. The Roe v. Wade decision went to far, too fast and was too sweeping. I believe that abortion should be legal. But I also believe that it should be re-regulated according to fetal development. It's the…

Profile of a Bill-ionaire

I am talking about Bill Gates, of course. Most people have read the recent reports that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates's personal net worth exceeds 40 billion dollars. Consider that he made this money in the 22 years or so since Microsoft was founded in 1975. If you assume he worked 14 hours a day on every business day of the year since then, that means he's been making money at a staggering half-million dollars per hour, approximately $150 per second. Gates owns $27,381,883,256.00 ($27.38 billion) of Microsoft stock, a sum that is greater than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most…

iPod iChing - I knew you were going to ask that now

Hot frantic friday, and we ask the iPod. Oh, mighty one - are we classically deterministic automata, predictable by any Turing machine, or do we have that most insidious of concepts, a true Free Will? Whoosh goes the randomizer... Whoosh. The Covering: Dammit Janet- Barry Bostwick et al The Crossing: Norðurljós - Thorir Ulfarsson The Crown: Að Lesa Og Skrifa List er Gó&eth: - Þuríður Pálsdóttir The Root: O Come, All Ye Faithful - King's College Choir The Past: John Reid BBC Radio 4 Interview on Iraq (Aug 12 2005) Podcast The Future: St Jimmy - Green Day The Questioner: Behind the Wall…

Another wingnut mistakes social darwinism for evolution

I know. It's WorldNutDaily, so it's guaranteed to be abysmally ignorant, but I had to comment on the opening bits of this dreadfully bad review of Wiker's book that blames Darwin for the Nazis. As a prologue to this book review, I propose the question: Can an idea, a theory, even a delusion kill? A cursory review just of 20th century dictators who overtly or covertly embraced and applied Darwin's ideas about evolution, survival of the fittest and natural selection to humanity, resulting in tens of millions of corpses they left in their wake, lamentably beckons a resounding, Yes! I agree that…

why do we hold people back

IF we grant the perception that researchers are being held back from doing some of the "really interesting research", then why do we do it, especially if people are aware of it as an issue? Well, it is a problem that has many levels. First of all, the committments I allude to are real: a lot of grants are contractual, and must the work as described must be carried out, or a good faith effort made to do so (or the recipient is unlikely to get any more grants). Some grants have flexibility, and a lot of grants officers are approachable for variances, but to invoke such things is both an…

iPod iChing - PZ'Ching

It is friday morning, and happy birthday PZ! So, we approach the mighty iPod and we ask... what does the iPod have to say about PZ? Whoosh goes the randomizer. Whoosh. The Covering: Wie? Wie? Wie? - Mozart (Magic Flute) The Crossing: Frosty the Snowman - Cranberry Singers The Crown: In the Bleak Midwinter - King's Choir The Root: Englishman in New York - Sting The Past: Search and Destroy - the Stooges The Future: Homenaje, Pour le Tombeau de Claude Debussy The Questioner: Skip to My Lou The House: Apollo 7 - Stravinsky The Inside: This Guitar Says Sorry (Alt Version) - Billy Bragg The…

defensive signing statement

President Bush did do a signing statement on HR 5631 - the 2007 defence appropriations bill Part of the President's Signing Statement: "Sections 8007, 8084, and 9005 of the Act prohibit the use of funds to initiate a special access program or a new start program, unless the congressional defense committees receive advance notice. The Supreme Court of the United States has stated that the President's authority to classify and control access to information bearing on the national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority. Although the…

"Brainwashed" by god into killing her child

LisaJ here again. Wow. Now here's a story that just disturbed me to no end. Little Javon Thompson's mother, 21 year old Ria Ramkissoon, became a Christian at a young age, but when her local pastor disappointed her by pleading guilty to molesting young boys, she left her church and was taken in instead by what is now being described as a dangerous religious cult (I'd like to make the point that even plain 'ole regular Christianity is a dangerous cult, but that's beside the point). This cult, called 1 Mind Ministries, is headed by a 40 year old, I'm assuming woman, who calls herself Queen…

Beyond Einstein - Verdict

Beyond Einstein 1) JDEM 2) LISA "Recommendation 1: NASA and DOE should proceed immediately with a competition to select a Joint Dark Energy Mission for a 2009 new start. The broad mission goals in the Request for Proposal should be 1) to determine the properties of dark energ with high precision and 2) to enable a broad range of astronomical investigations. The committee encourages the Agencies to seek as wide a variety of mission concepts and partnerships as possible." My translation of Rec 1.2 is that it tips the scales towards SNAP. ADEPT and DESTINY are more narrowly focused on Dark…

ultramassive black holes

The Milky Way has a roughly 3 million solar mass black hole at its center. The nearby M87 galaxy in the Virgo cluster has a roughly 3 billion solar mass black hole at its center. How much more massive do black holes get? Prof Priya Natarajan at Yale thinks she knows the answer: and that is that black hole mass maxes out at at measly 10 billion times the mass of the Sun, or so. It is hard to measure the mass of a black hole. Since we can't see it, mass measurements are generally indirect and represent bounds, sometimes only upper bounds, on the mass. The Milky Way's black hole is the nearest…

Physics Made Magical

Pontifications on Physics Personified, from two perspectives. Here is the Harry Potter personification of physics. 0. Newtonian gravity is Ron. Solid, dependable, good long heritage. It has its limits, but is surprisingly powerful. 1. Electromagnetism is Snape. You must master E&M, but so many have irrational fear or hatred of it. It leads to deep unification and glimpses of fundamental symmetries, and is strangely beautiful yet powerful. 2. Special Relativity is Ginny. Transcends classical mechanics, but in touch with its heritage. Practical, explosive, generally high energy.…

Must Read Library Blog: Library Babel Fish

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine. They cover lots of library issues and issues that are relevant to libraries, their blog network is pretty good with solid coverage of higher education issues and Joshua Kim's instructional technology blog covers a lot of ground, much of which is of interest for the library community. Unfortunately, they've never had a very good blog by a librarian. Until now. (They did make an attempt at a library blog about a year ago. We will not speak of it anymore.) Go check out the brand…

Ridiculous sanctimony

The state of California now issues gender-neutral marriage licenses: they simply register the legal relationship of "Party A" and "Party B", where the relevant individuals fill out their actual names. That sounds reasonable and straightforward to me — it's a state-mandated contract. Wouldn't you know it, though, there has to be someone offended by it. In an utterly absurd whine, Rachel Bird and Gideon Codding are stamping their selfish, privileged little feet and bleating that they are soooo upset about this. And to Bird and Codding, that is unacceptable. "We are traditionalists - we just…

Tell Us Where To Stand

Klaatu barada nikto. "The Day the Earth Stood Still" is one of the great classics of '50s science fiction, and one of my favourite old movies. It has, I gather, been remade, starring Keanu Reeves, and is coming out today. Now, I don't usually do a lot of these third party press releases, but it is one of my favourite movies, the trailer suggests it may not totally suck, and the press people came up with a hook that totally sold me... The DSCN dish. They are broadcasting the movie into space. The publicity company leased a Deep Space Communication Network dish (a li'l 5m dishes down in…

Mapping the Mosquito Genome

tags: mosquito, DNA, Aedes After recently mapping all the DNA, or genome, of the mosquito that spreads yellow and dengue fever, scientists were surprised to find it is more complex than the genome of the mosquito that carries malaria. Scientists plan to use this information to help them battle disease. Researchers published the genome yesterday for the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, which spreads disease in tropical and sub-tropical locales worldwide as it feeds on human blood. The mosquito's genome could guide researchers' efforts to develop new insecticides or to create genetically engineered…

Songs About Birds -- Can You Name Some?

tags: music, songs about birds Some birder pals of mine are discussing an interesting topic that I thought you would also enjoy; can you name any songs (or other musical pieces) that are about birds? If so, do you have any favorites? Here's my contribution to the conversation; John Denver's The Eagle and the Hawk, which I think captures the feeling one gets when experiencing an eagle or hawk in flight. This piece reminds me of birding on the prairies of central Washington state where I had the opportunity to experience soaring and courting golden eagles, prairie falcons and sometimes, a very…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which many workers still rely on to assure that they can return to their jobs after taking unpaid time off for a new baby or to deal with a serious illness - their own or a family member's. But, NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports, 40% of the workforce is ineligible for the leave, including those working fewer than 25 hours per week with an employer (even if they have multiple part-time jobs), workers at businesses with fewer than 50 employees, and those who want to care for a family member who doesn't meet the official "…

13 workers fatally injured every day in 2011

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the preliminary results of the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries: 4,609 fatal work injuries were recorded in 2011, down from 4,690 in 2010 (note that the 2010 number is the revised final total, though, while the 2011 figure is preliminary). This works out to a rate of 3.5 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in 2011, vs. 3.6 per 100,000 in 2010. BLS notes that fatal work injuries declined in the construction sector and private mining industry (which includes oil and gas extraction) and increased in private truck transportation. The…

A Florida community strengthens responses to trauma

There's a growing body of research linking childhood trauma (abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, etc.) to impaired brain development and functioning. Maia Szalavitz at TIME's Healthland blog describes the findings of new study by Harvard researchers (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences): Now, in the largest study yet to use brain scans to show the effects of child abuse, researchers have found specific changes in key regions in and around the hippocampus in the brains of young adults who were maltreated or neglected in childhood. These changes may leave victims…

Awful House transportation bill forgets that transit benefits drivers, too

The House of Representatives Natural Resources Committee has approved what Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood calls "the worst transportation bill I've ever seen during 35 years of public service." LaHood spent 14 years in Congress, serving as a Republican representative from Illinois, and told Politico that Congress always came together in the past to support transportation, but HR 7 is the most partisan transportation bill he's ever seen. For the past 30 years, federal transportation legislation has allocated a small portion of the national gas tax to transit funding. Under the new five-…

Things we may not think about until we need them: hospital preparedness

One of the disturbing aspects of the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany was the apparent lack of sufficient hospital surge capacity to handle a sudden influx of seriously ill patients. Der Spiegel reported: On Monday, hospitals all over northern Germany struggled to treat thousands of patients suffering from the effects of the bacteria. More than one-third of the people infected with E. coli have also come down with a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) which attacks the blood, kidneys and brain, and has left doctors racing to save lives. Ambulances have…

Occupational Health News Roundup

Mitsuru Obe reports in today's Wall Street Journal that three workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant have been exposed to moderately high levels of radiation, due to contact with radiactive water on the ground. Their reported exposures of 170 to 180 millisieverts are less than the new emergency limit of 250 millisieverts, but more than the usual limit of 100 millisieverts for workers' exposure during recovery efforts. This follows an earlier report from the New York Times that five workers have died since the quake and 22 more injured, 11 of those in a hydrogen explosion. Those…

"Safety talk" at the Tour de France

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay describes the Tour de France as part bike race and part soap opera. The 198 riders who start the 23-day event are phenomenal athletes. Many will complete the race but not until they peddle 2,200 miles across farm land, past historic monasteries, through charming villages, and up (and down) the Pyrenees and Alps. In my cyclist-rich area of central Texas, many conversations this month are colored with comments about “The Tour.” This year, as every year, some of the riders are involved in horrible crashes. Those who have to abandon the Tour often suffer broken…

Kleen Energy disaster anniversary, new worker safety bill introduced

Seven years ago this week, six workers were killed in a massive explosion at the site construction site for the Kleen Energy power plant in Middletown, CT.  Congressman Joe Courtney (D-CT), along with Democratic colleagues from the House Education and the Workforce Committee, marked the occasion by introducing the Protecting America’s Workers Act. Courtney's friend, Ron Crabb, was one victim of the blast, whom he remembered during his announcement about the bill.  “As the 2010 incident in Middletown and the catastrophic explosion in 2013 at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas demonstrate, the…

Amputations abound at Tyson Foods, OSHA records shed more light on industrial food production

Whole digits, tips of fingers, and parts of a thumb. These are body parts of Tyson Foods' employees which were severed last year in 10 of the company's plants. The details are made possible by a new OSHA regulation that took effect on January 1, 2015. The regulation requires employers to report within 24 hours any work-related incident that results in an amputation or hospitalization. After nearly a year on the books, I was curious to find out what just a single large employer had reported to federal OSHA. I picked Tyson Foods. It has more than more than 400 facilities in 30 US states and it…

Notable quotes on wages and public health

Higher income is linked to longer life expectancy, less activity limitation due to chronic illnesses, and fewer adults and children with reported fair or poor health. While discussions at the federal level on raising the minimum wage are going nowhere, state and local health commissioners are weighing in on the connection between income and health. TPH’s Kim Krisberg writes in the March issue of The Nation’s Health on why increases in the minimum wage are a public health issue. Rex Archer, MD, MPH, Director of the Kansas City, MO Department of Health told Krisberg: …[achieving] “a living wage…

I Got A Uni Job

My professional goal since undergraduate days 20 years ago has been to divide my working hours between indoor research, fieldwork and teaching. And so I applied for my first academic job in June of 2003, shortly before my thesis defence. When I saw the list of applicants (this stuff is public in Sweden) and checked everybody in the bibliographical database, I was optimistic. I had way, way more publications per year after age 25 than anybody else! But the job went to a guy who was twelve years older than me. What counted wasn't your output rate but your output sum: the thickness of your stack…

Recent Archaeomags

Archaeology mags have accreted on my shelf, though something's happened to my subscription to the always enjoyable Current Archaeology. I've written the editors. Populär Arkeologi 2010:4 opens with a look at the garishly painted reality of Classical sculpture. The only place where you could see white marble statues in ancient Greece and Rome was actually a sculptor's workshop. Then there's a spread by my buddies and Fornvännen contributors about this summer's rock-art discoveries in SmÃ¥land province, reported on here and here back in May. Johan Rönnby reports on a beautifully preserved…

Facts and theories

About the most useless game to play in discussions about global warming is to worry much about the distinctions between "proven facts", "theories", "hypotheses" and so on and so forth. These are ideas best left to philosophers and schoolmen. My image comes from the ever-helpful RS which is my excuse for having noticed a WUWT post. RS has picked out one obvious problem - which, oddly enough, the WUWT commentators notice too. A further one comes up when our hero attempts to probe these concepts further: In the scientific community, for both a law and a theory, a single conflicting experiment…

Exxon: the Peabody analogy

Someone (I forget who; remind me and I'll thank you) pointed me at Everything You Need to Know About the Exxon Climate Change Probe but were afraid to ask. That article makes some points I've already made (While environmental advocates have cheered Schneiderman’s effort to take energy firms to task over a global crisis, some legal scholars question whether he is the right man for the job. "You wonder why this is the sort of thing that a New York attorney general should be doing," said James Fanto, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. "It seems like it’s just completely politically motivated…

Some background on the Georgian Russian conflict

Via Truthout, here is some interesting and important background on the Russian-Georgian conflict that is going on right now, because as usual, these things do not just happen out of the blue despite the dazed and confused coverage in the mainstream media: When he was president, Clinton promised Yeltsin that NATO would not expand into former Soviet republics. In 2004, seven countries joined NATO, some of them right on Russia's borders At the same time, three other nations, including Georgia, took steps towards becoming members Pro-western governments took over in Georgia and the Ukraine (not…

Nelson responds

Paul Nelson responds to Amanda Marcotte, who mentioned that the poor quality of his debate explains why Nelson thinks ID should not be taught in schools. Amanda, Sahotra and I spent three hours talking at an Austin bar the night before the debate. I reiterated to him what I've said for years: I'm not interested in getting ID into the public schools. He allowed as much in his spoken remarks (which should be available soon as streaming video from the UPA), but still stood up a straw-man ID bad guy. What's funny is Sahotra and I have been debating/discussing design since we met in 1985, and in…

The Religious Right's Discrimination Hypocrisy

The layers of hypocrisy on the part of the religious right in relation to discrimination laws are many and varied. Let's examine them. Example #1: In California, they're screaming bloody murder that a bill adding sexual orientation to the state's anti-discrimination laws don't have an exemption for religious groups. But religion is already in the anti-discrimination legislation and they don't want any religious exemptions for that one, even for private universities. See this Agape Press article about a recent decision by Georgetown University (a private Jesuit university) to not allow…

Bush's Post-Hamdan Strategy

The Washington Post reports on a draft of the administration's proposal for how to structure the military tribunals. In stunning form, the proposal turns out to be a means of adding entirely new executive powers that we've never seen before: A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal. The plan, which would…

Matzke Punctures an ID Talking Point

Nick Matzke has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb poking a rather sizable hole in the latest ID strategy and the rhetoric used to defend it. The seeds of this strategy were sown in Ohio in 2002, where the Discovery Institute was pushing for inclusion of intelligent design in public school science classrooms in that state. They didn't quite have the votes on the board to get that done, so they settled for a fallback position: teaching "critical analysis" of evolutionary theory - which, of course, just means teaching all the ID arguments without using that label. They are now pursuing that…

Editing the Ten Commandments

A fascinating thing has been going on in the Louisiana legislature: they've been busy trying to edit the ten commandments. They are working on a bill that would allow the posting of the ten commandments on public property and in public buildings, but they're having a bit of trouble deciding which version to use. You see, there are at least three different versions - Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. The site is a bit surreal to witness: The committee didn't settle on the version to include but did amend the more Protestant-oriented version in the bill after a civil-rights lobbyist noted some…

More Anti-Gay Campaigning

Agape Press reports that the Traditional Values Coalition, one of the approximately 10,000 different religious right groups all complaining about the same things, is upset that CBS is showing a "pro-gay" public service announcement at the end of a soap opera: A conservative group is criticizing CBS Television for airing a pro-homosexual public service announcement during a daytime soap opera. The network was to air the PSA at the end of today's episode of As the World Turns, which featured a teen character who tells his parents he is homosexual. The PSA urges viewers to "take a stand against…