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razib | October 27, 2006There is a working paper out which reports on the nature of the religiousness of the professoriate. Some data of interest....
* Proportion of professors with "No religion" - 31% (vs. ~10% for the general public)
"I don't believe in God" - 10% (vs. 2.8% for the general public)
"I don't know whether there is a God, and I don't believe there is a way to find out" - 13.4% (vs. 4.1% for the general public)
"I don't believe in a personal God, but I do believe in a Higher Power of some kind" - 19.6%
"I find myself believing in God some of the time, but not at others" - 4.4%
"While I have my doubts…
revere | October 27, 2006"First they came for the Socialists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Socialist... Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak up for me." (Martin Niemoller)
The trial of the Tripoli Six is set to conclude on Tuesday, October 31, but already extraordinary events are taking place in the world of high status science.
Yesterday we posted on the letter of protest published in Science from 45 top scientists. The journals Science and Nature are arguably the two most prestigious scientific publications…
stcynic | October 27, 2006Agape Press reports:
Dobson is also convinced that a specific objective is lurking behind Wednesday's decision. "Nothing less than the future of the American family hangs in the balance if we allow one-man, one-woman marriage to be redefined out of existence," he says in a press release. "And make no mistake -- that is precisely the outcome the New Jersey Supreme Court is aiming for with this decision."
There's that stupid argument again - gay marriage is going to destroy the family! What family, Jimmy Boy? Yours? Mine? Anyone else's? Tell me one family that will be destroyed by gay marriage…
grrlscientist | October 27, 2006Okay, I'll admit this was an easy quiz, but I am an American afterall, so geography quizzes must be easy or I'd never pass them!
My score is below the fold -- I'd love to know what your score is, too!
You Passed 8th Grade Geography
Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!
Could You Pass 8th Grade Geography?
tqa | October 27, 2006It's Friday. Time to throw iTunes into random play, and see what comes up. This week, there isn't much of a theme going.
Artist
Song
1.
REM
Losing My Religion
2.
Jimmy Buffett
The Weather is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful
3.
Josh Joplin Group
Camera One
4.
Black 47
Like a Rolling Stone
5.
Porno for Pyros
Pets
6.
Bruce Springsteen
Pay Me My Money Down
7.
Billy Joel
Piano Man
8.
Bob Dylan
Mr. Tambourine Man
9.
Weezer
Buddy Holly
10.
Will Smith
Switch
grrlscientist | October 27, 2006This word is from one of the books that I am now reading, Mark Jerome Walters' Seeking the Sacred Raven: Politics and Extinctions on a Hawai'ian Island. This book is a fascinating portrayal of the myriad difficulties involved with trying to save an endangered species.
Evanescent (ev-uh-NES-uhnt) [Latin ÄvÄnÄscent- (s. of ÄvÄnÄscÄns): vanishing, disappearing.]
adj.
vanishing; fading away; fleeting.
tending to become imperceptible; scarcely perceptible.
Usage: The bird, I sometimes imagined, were I to fully comprehend its many dimensions, could deepen my understanding of both…
stcynic | October 27, 2006Wow. I'm not sure what to think about this. It's too easy to take the easy cheap shot on this, but it still gives me the creeps, mostly because of the connection to Frederick Douglass. And I just can't imagine why anyone would want to live in a place like this. Donald Rumsfeld's summer home on Chesapeake Bay is a place known to locals as Mount Misery. It was originally owned by a notorious slaveholder named Edward Covey, who was known as a "Negro breaker". Other slaveowners would send their slaves to him to have their will broken so they would be docile and submissive from that point on.…
stcynic | October 27, 2006My friends at Downsize DC are working hard to reverse the anti-gambling bill and to insure that no bill is ever passed in the same manner again. They've started an email campaign to get the bill rescinded, which you can help with by clicking here. They're also fighting to pass the Read the Bills Act, which would make it much more difficult to pass bills like this in the fly by night manner they did.
stcynic | October 27, 2006This is very cool, the video for Somewhere Down the Crazy River, by Robbie Robertson. This was a minor hit for him from a rare solo project. Click here.
cortex | October 27, 2006Only when it comes to alien life forms can the absence of decent data - the 1976 Viking mission did not not detect any organic molecules - seem so exciting. Here's Sharon Begley, from behind the WSJ firewall:
When scientists announced Monday that the search for life on Mars 30 years ago may not have been quite the bust it has long been portrayed, it didn't mean that the mission had missed any microorganisms, let alone advanced life forms. But it did underline the growing sense that decades of assumptions about extraterrestrial life need serious re-examination.
In 1976, scientists studying…
grrlscientist | October 26, 2006This fine word is often used by molecular biologists and protein chemists to describe proteins that are comprised of separate subunits. However, this word has a long and distinguished history outside of biology, as I recalled when I found it in a crossword puzzle in a book published by Dell;
Moiety (MOY-uh-tee) [Old French meitiet, from Late Latin medietas, from Latin medius, "middle."]
n.
One of two equal parts; a half.
An indefinite part; a small portion or share.
One of two basic tribal subdivisions.
Usage: Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at…
stcynic | October 26, 2006Okay, this is absolutely hilarious. Matt Bowman, writing on the ADF blog about the New Jersey ruling, says this:
Homosexual activists are already exploiting this holding to confuse the public and portray themselves as victims, lamenting that the court "reject[ed] gay marriage." If this is what homosexual activists consider a rejection of same-sex marriage, just wait until they implement the rest of their agenda and see if you can recognize the society that results.
But wait...less than 24 hours ago, the ADF put out a press release declaring NJ high court hands loss to marriage opponents. So…
stcynic | October 26, 2006After the Supreme Court denied cert in the Sea Scouts case, I knew it was only a matter of time before Hans Zeiger, the Worldnutdaily's boy wonder, would chime in with outrage and illogical arguments. And so he has. The Sea Scouts case, for those who don't recall, involved the question of whether the city of Berkeley could restrict a policy giving free slips at their city marina to non-profit groups by limiting it only to groups that do not engage in discrimination (the Sea Scouts, like the Boy Scouts, do not allow gays or atheists to join or be in positions of leadership).
As the U.S.…
stcynic | October 26, 2006The Worldnutdaily must have realized that they're not providing me with quite enough entertainment lately. They've now added Chuck Norris as a regular columnist. This should be good. His first column is highly amusing. He addresses the growing popularity of various lists of Chuck Norris facts around the internet (President Bush found it on the google). He seems to entirely miss the point:
There are more than 50,000 jokes making their way around the Internet that purport to be "facts" all playing off my movie roles as a "tough guy" and my history as a martial arts champion. But they aren't "…
stcynic | October 26, 2006Here's a really good rant from Bill Maher about a Florida county that, for some bizarre reason, decided it was important to institute mandatory drug testing for library volunteers.
stcynic | October 25, 2006In watching the Bush administration fall all over themselves in the last few days over "stay the course" - Bush said they'd never said that, then video is shown of him saying that a few dozens times, then Rumsfeld jumped in - it occurs to me that we need a new cabinet-level position: a Secretary of Catchphrases. Someone to keep track of the overly simplistic, virtually meaningless politico-speak that dominates the nation's discourse. Someone who can make sure that everyone knows what they're supposed to say. No more getting confused over whether today we're talking about "staying the course"…
grrlscientist | October 25, 2006This fine word also comes from Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith;
Ineluctable (in-i-LUHK-tuh-buhl) [Latin inluctbilis : in, not + luctbilis, penetrable]
adj.
incapable of being evaded; inescapable.
Usage: At the heart of every totalitarian enterprise, one sees outlandish dogmas, poorly arranged, but working ineluctably like gears in some ludicrous instrument of death.
.
tags: ineluctable, word of the day, vocabulary
tqa | October 24, 2006The Cheerful Oncologist just tossed up a post on one of the Laws of Medicine. Sitting here, on my third beer of the night, I can't help but wonder if he knows how lucky he is to be working in an area of medicine that is stable enough to have laws. Back in my younger days, a decade or so ago, I put in a couple of years as an EMT. Emergency Medical Services has no laws, and while there are things that we might call "rules," they're more like guidelines.
Since I'm writing up this particular trip down memory lane in response to a post from an MD, it seems only appropriate to start with Guideline…
stcynic | October 24, 2006Radley Balko's latest column at Fox News focuses on Frist's ridiculous attempt to ban online gambling. He deftly punctures every one of the false reasons offered in support of the legislation and points out the rank hypocrisy behind the bill.
ddobbs | October 24, 2006I've been remiss in not posting several articles I wrote reporting on findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. So, last first:
This story, posted today at sciam.com, is about a nice piece of research done by the University of Milan's Maria Abbracchio, who found that blocking the receptor that opened a particular cellular gate (a fairly simple task, actually) could prevent almost all damage from strokes in lab rats.
Check it out at:
Scientific American: Controlling Cellular Gates Curbs Damage after Strokes