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The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor - Chapter 85

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 84 Table of Contents Chapter 86 Chapter 85 Tephra, February 3, 2060 I got a late night call from Rhamaposa that shocked me awake. "I just wanted to check how you were coming with that Cambridge Bay inquiry," he said. With a sinking feeling, I realized that between my funk and the holidays, it had completely slipped my mind. For a second, I considered a Matt-style gambit, but I opted to come clean. "I'm sorry, Peter. I have been a little overloaded and haven't got around to it yet." He took this admission in stride and signed off saying, "Okay…

January's Robert O'Brien Trophy Winner: Joseph Farah

For the second time in three months, Joseph Farah, owner of the Worldnutdaily, is the winner of the Robert O'Brien Trophy (formerly the Idiot of the Month Award). His latest foray into the world of sheer idiocy is this column, called The Threat to Adoption. Actually, it's not so much the column itself. There is much in it that I agree with. For instance, he says: Imagine this horror, if you can. You're a 3½-year-old child. One day, you are taken away from the only people you have ever known as Mommy and Daddy and told you will now be living with strangers. It is happening all too often in…

Solving the San Francisco plankton mystery

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Look into the oceans past the sharks, seals and fish and you will find the tiny phytoplankton. These small organisms form the basis of life in the seas but if their populations get to big, they can also choke the life from it by forming large and suffocating algal blooms. The waters of San Francisco Bay have never had big problems with these blooms and if anything, scientists worried that the waters didn't have enough phytoplankton. All that changed in 1999, when the phytoplankton population started…

Unintentional genetic engineering - grafted plants trade genes

For centuries, farmers have been genetically modifying their plants without even knowing it. That's the message from German scientists who found that grafting, a common technique used to fuse parts of two plants together, causes the two halves to swap genes with each other. Grafting can involve fusing the stem of one plant (the scion) to the roots of another (the stock), or a dormant bud to another stem. There are many reasons for this - sometimes it's the most cost-effective way of cultivating the scion, sometimes the stock has properties that the scion lacks including hardiness or…

The Chronologer's Quest

Most of us have seen or heard of those who challenge the age of the Earth, from the undue pressure on the NPS, to the assertions that the Earth is "really" just 6000 or so years old. But how did we arrive at the present figure of 4.55 billion years? "The Chronologers' Quest: The Search for the Age of the Earth" (Patrick Wyse Jackson), gives a nice and comprehensive account of the project to date the earth, and the means used to do it, from early modern theological approaches like the famous Ussher's (and Jackson has some corrections to make to Gould's essay on the topic), through to the…

Genesis 2

At the time of YHWH, God's making of earth and heaven, no bush of the field was yet on earth,no plant of the field had yet sprung up,for YHWH, God, had not made it rain upon the earth,and there was no human/adam to till the soil/adama–but a surge would well up from the ground and water all the face of the soul;and YHWH, God, formed the human, of dust from the soilhe blew into his nostrils the breath of lifeand the human became a living being. YHWH, God, planted a garden in Eden/Land-of-Pleasure, in the east,and there he placed the human whom he had formed. … Now YHWH, God, said:It is not good…

More Groupoids and Groups

In my introduction to groupoids, I mentioned that if you have a groupoid, you can find groups within it. Given a groupoid in categorical form, if you take any object in the groupoid, and collect up the paths through morphisms from that object back to itself, then that collection will form a group. Today, I'm going to explore a bit more of the relationship between groupoids and groups. Before I get into it, I'd like to do two things. First, a mea culpa: this stuff is out on the edge of what I really understand. My category-theory-foo isn't great, and I'm definitely on thin ice here. I think…

The Netherlands & Islam

Aziz points me to this article over at alt.muslim which reviews Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma. It is a fair review, but this caught my attention: ...Buruma's parallelisation of the careers of both Fortuyn and Van Gogh and their capitalisation on Islamophobia begs the question of how the Enlightenment virtues of freedom and reason could have been politically perverted to justify hatred for a racial underclass. This crucial question, posed repeatedly, if not directly, by Buruma through his coinage of the term "Enlightenment fundamentalist" represents the most intellectually fascinating…

Intelligent Gestation Theory

In case you've been wondering what was going to come after Intelligent Design, here's a similar hypothesis I stumbled across, Intelligent Gestation Theory. Hello fellow Christians and Atheists, My name is Erik Lumberjack. I'm founder and chief scientist of the recently formed Intelligent Gestation Institute. Our goal is apply insights gained from Intelligent Design to combat the current Theory of Pregnancy, i.e., that humans develop gradually from a sperm and egg. Our FAQs below provide more details. Thank you and best regards, Eric Lumberjack OPEN LETTER TO KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD Thank you…

NPR Should Call the Conservatives' Bluff

If you haven't heard, a NPR executive was forced to resign after an undercover recording by the minions of James O'Keefe. I don't see why anyone's getting bent out of shape because said executive called the Tea Party "racist"--some of them are quite bigoted, and other are scary, gun toting people (remember, they brought weapons to townhall meetings about healthcare). But I digress. What seems to have become a talking point is this statement: Republicans play off the belief among the general population that most of our funding comes from the government. Very little of our funding comes from…

Environment and Humanities Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Environment and Humanities & Social Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Environment. From Flickr, by *higetiger Humanities & Social Science. Michael Phelps touches the pool's edge just ahead of Milorad Cavic in the mens' 100m butterfly. From Flickr, by M@rcopako Reader comments of the week: In Image Repair? Exxon Mobil Lets Scientists Tell Its Story, Matt Nisbet of Framing Science questions the implications of a new Exxon Mobil ad series. Scientists in the ads discuss research being conducted by…

Life Science and Physical Science Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Life Science and Physical Science channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Life Science. From Flickr, by oskay Physical Science. Luray Caverns in Virginia. From Flickr, by cloudsoup Reader comments of the week: On the Life Science channel, Chris Rowan of Highly Allochthonous defends volcanoes—after Craig McClain alleged that they were evil on Deep Sea News—on Volcanoes: our noble allies in the battle against export productivity. Chris admits that volcanic events can cause mass extinctions, and harm marine life in…

Environment and Humanities Weekly Channel Highlights,

Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual channels. We've already seen what the Life Science and Physical Science channels had to offer; below, please find a few gems from the Environment and Humanities channels: Environment. Hurricane Kate: from NASA, via pingnews.com on Flickr Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by shioshvili Reader comments of the week: In What is the Ecological Footprint of…

The LHC shows the way

For reasons too complicated to explain, I am at The LHC Show the Way workshop at the Aspen Center for Physics. This is a three week workshop on the latest results from the LHC, to be followed by a four week workshop on new physics from the LHC and possible connections to dark matter. The kickoff presentation is on the current status of the experimental results. Relayed from the ICHEP meeting. Just for fun I'll do some liveblogging from the somewhat outside perspective of an astrophysicist. The current run at the LHC will be extended to Dec 17, couple months beyond planned before going into a…

Of dragons and microbes

[From the archives; originally posted November 22, 2005] Carl Zimmer has a post today about the work of Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry on the evolution of snake venom. If that name sounds familiar to those of you who aren't reptile specialists, you may have run across Dr. Fry's homepage, or you may have seen his research profiled previously on Panda's Thumb here, or you may have read comments by the good doc in this thread. Zimmer, as always, has an excellent overview of Fry et al's new paper in Nature (link ), but he didn't emphasize the one sneak peek I received from Bryan. This tasty bit of…

Paper finds mercury *does* cause autism?

Lest those who support the vaccine-autism link accuse me of ignoring this by not jumping on it immediately, I want to briefly point out a new study suggesting autism rates decline as thimerosal has been removed from childhood vaccines. From the press release: A new study shows that autism may be linked after all to the use of mercury in childhood vaccines, despite government's previous claims to the contrary. An article in the March 10, 2006 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPandS.org) shows that since mercury was removed from childhood vaccines, the alarming…

Libdems plan zero-carbon Britain

Yes, thats right, all the power plants will be in Northern Ireland, ha ha. Anyway Huhne plans zero-carbon Britain sez the grauniad. Interesting. The policy paper is here, reassuringly titled "final". Nice to see a major party advocating this stuff. There are lots of bits in there, but the bit I was trying to source was "Setting a target for 30 per cent of the UK's electricity to come from clean, noncarbon emitting sources by 2020, rising to 100 per cent by 2050" ("clean" in this context means not-nuclear). Thats just 'lectric, but they also say they "would also set targets for increasing the…

Ernie Barnes 1938-2009; Artist and NFL Football Great

Word around town and just tweeted by local hero, Ayse, is that the great Ernie Barnes passed away yesterday at the age of 70. From the biography at Mr Barnes' website: Born Ernest Barnes, Jr. on July 15, 1938 to Ernest Sr. and Fannie Mae Geer Barnes during the Jim Crow era in Durham, North Carolina, his mother worked as a domestic for a prominent attorney. As a child, young Ernest would accompany her to work and was allowed to peruse the extensive collection of art books. One day in junior high school, a teacher found the self-admitted fat, introverted young Barnes drawing in a notebook while…

Another Year, Another Shifting Baseline

...make that baselines. Check out these stories from the last week alone. A perennial favorite: high hopes for hagfish Fishermen on Canada's East Coast are now considering harvesting hagfish and sea cucumber. Once the center of the cod industry, East Coast fishermen have already turned to sea urchin, toad crab and rock crab in the wake of overfishing and the cod's collapse. Now they have high hopes for hagfish. The best line in the article comes from Scott Grant, a fisheries biologist in St. John's with the Marine Institute at Memorial University who has helped develop the new harvests…

Review: Planet Ocean

Planet Ocean: Photo Stories from the 'Defending Our Oceans' Voyage by Sara Holden was recently released. It's a coffee table book that brings together beautiful imagery as well as the human impacts imperiling that beauty and, in this case, what Greenpeace is doing about it,including scenes from their most recent expedition. On behalf of Greenpeace, Holden argues that 40% of the oceans should be set aside as marine reserve, which would cost an estimated $12 billion per year. If this seems like a lot, Holden is quick to point out that we spend $20 billion each year in the U.S. on ice cream…

"Geek Chic - Computer Science Is The New Sexy"

According to the Chronicle news blog, computer science enrollment is down by half since 2000. ...undergraduate enrollment in computer-science programs had fallen to half of what it was in 2000 (15,958 to 7,915, to be exact). But according to Inside Higher Ed, the computer science major has rebounded! For the first time since 2000, the number of newly declared undergraduate majors at doctoral-granting computer science departments is up. They have a table that shows enrollment for the last 7 years. 2006 does look like the nadir, though it's a bit soon to tell if the 2007 number is the…

What's the matter with Andrew Brown's brain?

He's completely lost me again. Brown has a couple of posts up complaining about people referring to mental illness as a "brain disease" and confusing mind with brain — he seems to deplore the growing recognition that the mind is entirely a product of the brain, and that psychology is built on a physical substrate, which leads to what he thinks is a premature reduction of mind to brain. He's not making an argument from dualism, though; the gist of his complaint is that you can't deduce thoughts from the structure of the brain, therefore it's an invalid approach. That doesn't make any sense. We…

Developing dumbness

I get a lot of Google alerts about various things, including species concepts, obviously. I have noticed a pattern: media from the so-called "developed" or "first world" almost never put much in the way of actual facts or knowledge in their reports, concerned, I guess, that it will scare the consumers away. But the developing nations, in this case Bangladesh, will do so. They seem to value knowledge and science. Wonder why? Here's a piece "The Importance of biodiversity", from The New Nation, a Bangladeshi independent newspaper: Wetland ecosystems (swamps, marshes, etc.) absorb and…

APS 2008: Can we learn from errors? What if we're running a nuclear power plant?

Just a few quick notes about Michael Frese's talk, "Learning from Errors by Individuals and Organizations." Frese gives a rule: "You make about 3-4 errors per hour no matter what you're doing." If errors are so ubiquitous, maybe it makes more sense to train people to deal with errors, rather than to try to flush out every possible error. Frese and others have studied this phenomenon in the lab. They found that error management actually led to improved performance on computer training tasks: if you are trained to expect errors and deal with them, you do better on the task. There are limits to…

Extra, Extra

Science and Science Writing You've checked out the new blog, Child's Play, I'm writing with Melody Dye over at Scientopia, right? She started us off with an *awesome* series on delay of gratification and the cookie task (start here). Apparently monkeys hate flying squirrels. And I hate the deck of this article. As long as we're all hating something, I suppose. Why are male whales humping eachother? From New Scientist: Why are dogs and their owners so much alike? Via blog bff Andi Kuszewski of the Rogue Neuron blog: The Psychopathology of Heroism Can squid fly? by Ferris Jabr. Want more squid…

Eocene Florida Plant Remains = Rethink Local Geology A Little

Sometimes interesting scientific evidence shows up in unexpected places. Years ago, there had been discussion of the possibility that immediate post glacial climate in the North Atlantic coastal region was unusually warm, but the evidence was spotty. Then, I was looking through material taken from a geotechnical boring placed to assess the geology of a part of Boston Harbor where a new tunnel was being planned, and found a large fragment of a clam embedded in clay. The clay was deposited during the last glacial maximum and later, and was associated with the melting of glaciers in the…

Global Warming = Drought = Higher Food Prices

Here's a graph from the USDA: This comes from a post by Peter Sinclair: USDA: Warming Will Devastate Agriculture. Also from that post, this interview with Phil Robertson of Michigan State University related to the question of C02 as "plant food."

Octopuses vs. octopi

Image from: The Living World of Molluscs, http://Molluscs.at Thank you to a recent comment from a reader questioning whether the proper plural form of octopus is octopuses or octopi. Here is the "official" answer from the editor at Merriam Webster:

The doctrine of preemption, as applied to arachnids

Story from North America from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo. "Story from North America" Garrett Davis and Kristen Lepore Thanks to reader Claire for finding this strangely poignant yet bizarre short film. I'm not sure what to think of this one.

Comments of the Week #130: from incinerating Earth's garbage to connecting the Universe's birth and demise

“Life and death matters, yes. And the question of how to behave in this world, how to go in the face of everything. Time is short and the water is rising.” -Raymond Carver As we make our way through October, Halloween approaches here at Starts With A Bang! But as eerie as the world and our Universe might be, our goal is always to shed a little light into how we know the things we do, and what the possibilities beyond our knowledge might be. Take a look back on this past week in case you missed anything: Why don't we shoot Earth's garbage into the Sun? (for Ask Ethan), Astronomy's dark horse…

Thermonuclear stupid about vaccines from someone other than Jenny McCarthy

This may be the burningest stupid I've ever seen about vaccines. Maybe. It's so hard to tell given how much idiocy I've seen about vaccines. I know, it's really, really hard to believe me when I say that what follows deserves to leap right up to the top ranks of brain-melting moronicity. After all, over the last four years, I've delved into the deepest, darkest chasms of pure anti-vaccine stupid. I've subjected myself to the incredible idiocy that is Jenny McCarthy and Kent Heckenlively. I've delved into the most vile cesspits of anti-vaccine propaganda, cesspits so full of misinformation and…

New Frontiers: Big Questions Conference II

The second session of the New Frontiers in Astronomy and Cosmology conference was friday afternoon. The plan was to do a leisurely liveblog of the talks. However, during lunch, there were some interesting developments, which I can hopefully tell you about next week some time, and in the middle of the discussion I was told that I was the session chair for the afternoon and we were starting in two minutes. And a brilliant session it was too. But as chair it was a bit hard to take notes and blog it live... So you get the tape delayed version, editors cut, instead: We continued after lunch with…

Categories: Products, Exponentials, and the Cartesian Closed Categories

Before I dive into the depths of todays post, I want to clarify something. Last time, I defined categorical products. Alas, I neglected to mention one important point, which led to a bit of confusion in the comments, so I'll restate the important omission here. The definition of categorical product defines what the product looks like *if it's in the category*. There is no requirement that a category include the products for all, or indeed for any, of its members. Categories are *not closed* with respect to categorical product. That point leads up to the main topic of this post. There's a…

Amazon Powers Carbon Sink in Tropical Ocean

A new study from University of Southern California was just released, appearing in PNAS Early Edition the week of July 21, showing that run-off from the Amazon River powers a large carbon sink in the tropical North Atlantic ocean. New Scientist talks about it here. According to the press realease, which I will quote at the end of the post, this overturns the previously held view that this area of the ocean was a net emmitter of carbon. The river delivers iron and phosphorous to small organizims called diazotrophs which then fix nitrogen and carbon from the air and ultimately sink it to the…

If your toddler falls from your window, will it necessarily die?

No! A surprising number of toddlers who manage to get their way through a window opening to fall to the pavement below live. Something just over three thousand toddlers do this every year in the US. Here in Minneapolis, we had our first reported case for the Spring Season of a toddler falling out of a window. The window had a screen in it but that did not stop the child, in Nordeast, from flying out the window after a bad bounce jumping on the bed. He fell three stories. He'll live. He probably bounced off a few things on the way to the ground. This event reminded me to repost this item…

Buzzing bees scare elephants away

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material. It's a myth that elephants are afraid of mice, but new research shows that they're not too keen on bees. Even though they fearlessly stand up to lions, the mere buzzing of bees is enough to send a herd of elephants running off. Armed with this knowledge, African farmers may soon be able to use strategically placed hives or recordings to minimise conflicts with elephants. Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Fritz Vollrath…

John R. Lott. Jr.'s Reply to Otis Duncan's Recent Article in The Criminologist

(from The Criminologist Vol 25, No 5 Sep/Oct 2000 pp 1,6) In a recent issue of the Criminologist, Otis Duncan raises concerns about my writings. He discusses a wide range of issues from the estimated number of defensive gun uses and the rate at which defensive uses result in the gun being fired to even the significance of why the NRA doesn't cite certain aspects of my research. Let me go through the different points raised by Duncan: In discussing my op-ed pieces, Duncan notes that "It is especially noteworthy that Lott does not credit Kleck with the estimate of 2.5 million." (p. 5)…

Arctic Ice Loss

You all know that the Arctic Ice melts more each summer than ever before. In a few years, the Arctic will be ice free during the summer. The rate of annual melting is greater than expected even just a few years ago. Please note that the increasing melt of Arctic sea ice does not bode well for the associated Greenland Ice Sheet which is also showing signs of melting at a higher rate than expected. The melting of Arctic sea ice has a number of important environmental implications, but the melting of the Greenland Glacier has that plus more; it will contribute significantly to sea level rise…

Ice Loss at Poles Is Increasing, Mainly in Greenland

From NASA: PASADENA, Calif. - An international team of experts supported by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) has combined data from multiple satellites and aircraft to produce the most comprehensive and accurate assessment to date of ice sheet losses in Greenland and Antarctica and their contributions to sea level rise. In a landmark study published Thursday in the journal Science, 47 researchers from 26 laboratories report the combined rate of melting for the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica has increased during the last 20 years. Together, these ice sheets are losing…

Hastert's Disingenuous Defense

As a follow up to my previous post about Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's insane comments about George Soros, you need to read Jack Shafer's column on Slate about both Hastert's initial statement and his utterly dishonest defense thereof. Soros wrote Hastert a letter demanding an apology and Hastert replied with this letter, packed with baldfaced lies. His first lie is that he was referring not to "drug cartels" but to pro-legalization groups that Soros funds. Shafer nails this lie perfectly: Hastert states in a Sept. 1 letter to Soros that he never referred to drug cartels on Fox News…

Megaflood in English Channel separated Britain from France

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, one of the largest floods in Earth's history turned us into an island and changed the course of our history. Britain was not always isolated from our continental neighbours. In the Pleistocene era, we were linked to France by a land ridge called the Weald-Artois anticline that extended from Dover, across what are now the Dover Straits. This ridge of chalk separated the North Sea on one side from the English Channel on the other. For Britain to become an island, something had to have breached the ridge. Now, Sanjeev Gupta and colleagues from Imperial…

Tid Bits, Downtime Edition

One common feature of bench work is downtime. Some activity, such as cutting and pasting DNA, require the researcher to incubate their samples for various periods of time. What to do? Well ideally the scientist in question should take advantage of this time to either, perform other experiments, make reagents such as buffers, or catch up on the scientific literature. I tend to use Google Reader to scan the RSS feeds from various journals. Of course I scan through blogs as well. Sometimes though your day is filled with some brain-draining activity, such as microinjecting tissue culture cells.…

Study Confirms Link Between Autism and Use of Cells From Abortions in Vaccines?

First, let's get this straight. I'm all for anti-science anti-vaxer right wingers not being vaccinated, as long as a) we take their children away from them (and vaccinate the poor dears) and b) isolate the adult anti-vaxers from the rest of the species, perhaps in Texas. But in the meantime, let's look at the latest bit of (mis)information from the utterly insane side of our society. If nothing else, this story may serve to remind us all what we are fighting about.... not the attitude of this or that skeptics, or which movements should or should not be engaged in chopping the pope down to…

Ian Plimer lies about source of his figure 3

Remember how Ian Plimer claimed that he could not recall where his dodgy figure 3? Well now he has resorting to lying about the source. In a talkback radio debate (about 4 minutes from the end) with Steven Sherwood, Plimer claimed that the graph came from page 21 of Klimafakten, a book published by the German government in 2001. That's a straight-up lie. The graph came from Durkin's Great Global Warming Swindle. I've overlaid the graphs below so that you can see that they are identical. Just put your mouse on the graph to change it to the Swindle one. Notice that he copied the labels on…

Clock Quotes

Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter light, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. Plato (427 BC…

Online submission makes it easier for people in developing countries to submit their scientific manuscripts

Changes in publication statistics when electronic submission was introduced in an international applied science journal: In a refereed journal in the food and agriculture sector, papers were tracked over a five-year period during the introduction of electronic submissions. Papers originated in the Americas and Pacific region and were processed in Canada. Acceptance times for revised papers were reduced (P < 0.001) to 59% of the original, from 156.5 ± 69.1 days to 92.8 ± 57.5 days. But the start of electronic submission coincided with a change in the geographical origin of papers, with…

not fair?

Shelley at Retrospectacle ran into a corporate tangle of moronicity to cut a long story short, she used a figure from a paper in discussing the article, which seems to be clear "fair use", and got a lawyer letter from the publishers (Wiley). Here is the original - with figure recreated from the data rather than cut'n'pasted (duh!) A lot has been said alredy, this is really just to link in sympathy and point people at the flap. My take on it is that Wiley are being morons. Shelley's article was clearly fair use, and recreating the plot from the data is trivial anyway. There is probably some…

Bacterial metagenomics on the JHU campus: analyzing the data, part III

This is third video in our series on analyzing the DNA sequences that came from bacteria on the JHU campus. In this video, we use a pivot table to count all the different types of bacteria that students found in 2004 and we make a pie graph to visualize the different numbers of each genus. The parts of this series are: I. Downloading the data from iFinch and preparing it for analysis. (this is the video below) (We split the data from one column into three). II. Cleaning up the data III. Counting all the bacteria IV. Counting the bacteria by biome Part III. Pivot tables from Sandra Porter on…

1,500,000,000 Birds on Film

This amazing video depicts thousands, hundreds of thousands and then billions of birds -- all caught on video courtesy of the Planet Earth series. This video also features some wonderful music, a piece called "Rushing" from the album called Play by Moby, that will send chills up your spine. [2:37] (Incidentally, those of you who saw the amazing movie, Seabiscuit, also know of Moby from another piece of his entitled "Everloving", also from the album, Play. That particular piece was the background music for when Seabiscuit ran his first race after recovering from his leg injury -- can you tell…

Richard Thompson's Martyr Pose

From the Department of Ridiculous Hyperbole comes this statement from Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center: Behind its legal actions is the belief by its president and chief counsel Richard Thompson that Christianity is under siege from all quarters, but especially from the federal courts, the American Civil Liberties Union, and what Thompson calls the "homosexual lobby." The ACLU and the courts are "basically cleansing America of religion and particularly Christianity," Thompson says. "It's almost like a genocide. It's a sophisticated genocide." Well of course. The US is a nation…