Our government, it understands
That prayerful laying on of hands
And bugging God with vain demands
Can make the sick feel well
Examined with a skeptic’s mind,
The study was not well designed
Not single-, much less double-blind
There’s nothing it can tell.

The Templeton foundation tried
To use religion as their guide—
To show that prayer, when it’s applied
Directly, really works
And now this bit of woo-ish blight
Is published on the “Health News” site—
Our government, endorsing shite—
Encouraging the jerks.

If each objecting thinker sent
A note expressing discontent
(With reasons), might the site repent
The error of their ways?
If modern thinkers shine their lights
On ancient superstitious rites,
We’ll trade the ancient dark-age nights
For more enlightened days!

(Although they need to get in shape,
There is one fact we can’t escape:
It’s government. Expect red tape.
Proceed, of course, with care.
But if they claim, in their defense,
That study gave us evidence?
No higher thought, nor common sense—
They haven’t got a prayer!)

First, the real deal:

*wipes away tear*

Of course, we have a new plague of patriots across the nation, who have taken what should have been the non-story of the hour and turned it into a new crusade; in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, for instance, the issue is not whether a new Islamic Center is “in the shadow of Ground Zero”–it clearly is not–but whether Muslims should be allowed to build at all, anywhere:

The leader of the opposition has tried stopping construction with environmental and traffic concerns. But most of the people rallying against the mosque, like Ben Fletcher, have a different argument.

“We’re Christians and this religion represents people that are against Christians. That’s something we need to look at, you know, because you’re going to have a lot of trouble down the line,” Fletcher says.

He says he does not know exactly what trouble looks like, but he and others worry about terrorist links and Muslims wanting to impose Shariah (Islamic law).

Sounds like a threat to me.

Sorry, Ray, but we need to update that song.

O beautiful for Christian views
Conjoining church and state
We’ll saturate the evening news
With ignorance and hate!
America! America!
Thy faithful know thy might!
Where all are free, so long as we
Are Christian, male and white!

O beautiful for city skies
With gleaming steeples filled
Where freedom’s golden eagle flies
And Muslims fear to build!
America! America!
How great will be thy loss!
Thy honored flag is now a gag,
Thy symbol now a cross!

O beautiful for idiot’s words
Intended to divide
The people seen as brainless herds
With anger as their guide!
America! America!
Thy passions take control
The will of some shall overcome
The nation as a whole

I suppose, perhaps, we need one more verse. An optimistic one.

O beautiful for founders’ sight
With every power checked
‘Gainst roiling mob or leader’s might
We dissidence protect!
America! America!
Cacophonous and loud!
From diff’rence, make a bold mosaic
Of which we may be proud!

I can’t believe no one has written this song yet, but a quick google for the line from the chorus suggests no one has. Now, if I can only get Roy Zimmerman to sing it, all would be right in the world.

Intro:

I’ve been watching the news from California
Where an activist judge had his say
And conservative pundits now warn ya
You’ll only be safe if you’re gay
They talk to the networks and papers
And they speak of the dangers and harms
Then they swoon, with a case of the vapors
With their trophy wives clutching their arms

“They’re changing the meaning of marriage
The bonds that we used to hold dear
From a heterosexual pair-age
To a union a little more queer
A marriage is sacred and holy
Or at least, it has been so for me;
And perhaps a divorce, as a matter of course,
For to marry wife two or wife three”

Song:

I’ve been watching the queers at the courthouse
Where they pose for the cameras, and kiss
And although I’m not gay, there is one man today
Who I’d join in connubial bliss:

Oh, I wanna marry Newt Gingrich—
He’s perfection in only one man
I wanna marry Newt Gingrich,
So I’m thanking the courts that I can!

Cos Newt is an expert on marriage
A commitment “till death do us part”
He’s so smart, and so cute; he’s my teddy-bear Newt
And I love him with all of my heart

Oh, I wanna marry Newt Gingrich—
The conservative man I adore
I wanna marry Newt Gingrich,
And love him as “spouse number four”!

We’ll walk down the aisle together
On that wonderful, magical day
We’ll be “Mister and Mister”, and maybe Newt’s sister
Could give her big brother away

Oh, I wanna marry Newt Gingrich—
What a wonderful, marvelous thing!
I wanna marry Newt Gingrich,
I’ll be wearing Newt Gingrich’s ring!

Sure, he left his first wife on her deathbed
And he left “Mrs. Two” for “Miss Three”
But with Newt on my arm, I say, “fourth time’s a charm!”
He’ll be happier married to me!

Yes, I wanna marry Newt Gingrich—
He’s perfection in only one man
I wanna marry Newt Gingrich,
So I’m thanking the courts that I can!

Bradley was a different sort—
He did not play a contact sport;
He did not bow his head and pray,
As schoolmates did, to start the day;
He did not, though they found him odd
Recite the pledge with “under god”;
Or do his homework, if he thought
It asked him stuff it hadn’t ought
(As when his teachers vainly took
Their lessons from their Holy Book—
Let’s all forget that they were wrong;
Why couldn’t Bradley get along?)
His Army tags said “Humanist”,
And so I think you get the gist:
He’s godless, headstrong, smart and gay…
All reasons he’s locked up today.

I am not going to pretend to know enough about the case to take a strong stand on the big picture. Bradley Manning has been called a hero and a traitor, a man who should be set free, a man who should be hanged “from the same platform as Saddam was”. His actions have been laudable, or deplorable, depending on whom you ask.

But his recent actions are not the focus of today’s New York Times article. In the latest addition to a long tradition of armchair psychoanalysis (and yes, I am well aware that professional psychoanalysis is hell and gone from a worthwhile picture of someone’s motives), the NYT’s Ginger Thompson focuses on the details of his private life, implying that in hindsight we can see what a different sort of man Manning was…

At school, Bradley Manning was clearly different from most of his peers. He preferred hacking computer games rather than playing them, former neighbors said. And they said he seemed opinionated beyond his years about politics, religion, and even about keeping religion out of politics.

In his Bible Belt hometown that he once mockingly wrote in an e-mail had “more pews than people,” Private Manning refused to recite the parts of the Pledge of Allegiance that referred to God or do homework assignments that involved the Scriptures. And if a teacher challenged his views, former classmates said, he was quick to push back.

No one in my family recites the “under god” bit. The courts have said it’s just hunky-dory by them. Why is this an issue? And school assignments that involved the scriptures? I suspect that the courts would side with Manning on this one as well. The article could have focused on the oppressive environment Manning found himself in, but (there’s a reason they call it the Fundamental Attribution Error) instead they choose to point the finger at the odd (I almost wrote “queer”) kid who stands up for his First Amendment rights.

Friends said Private Manning found the atmosphere here to be everything the Army was not: openly accepting of his geeky side, his liberal political opinions, his relationship with Mr. Watkins and his ambition to do something that would get attention.

Although hacking has come to mean a lot of different things, at its core, those who do it say, is the philosophy that information should be free and accessible to all. And Private Manning had access to some of the most secret information on the planet.

Meanwhile, his military career was anything but stellar. He had been reprimanded twice, including once for assaulting an officer. He wrote in e-mails that he felt “regularly ignored” by his superiors “except when I had something essential, then it was back to ‘Bring me coffee, then sweep the floor.’ ”

And it seems the more isolated he felt in the military — he wore custom dog tags that said “Humanist,” and friends said he kept a toy fairy wand on his desk in Iraq — the more he clung to his hacker friends.

Ah… a Humanist? That bastard! (Perhaps the author should have looked into how unusual “custom dog tags” actually are.)

Oddly enough, I am tempted to look into Ginger Thompson’s formative years, to see what sort of personal inadequacies must have inevitably led to writing an article like this.

Turn the heat up even hotter
Hot enough to boil water
Sitting in a sauna, a competitive event?
Which of them will last the longest?
Who will show their will the strongest?
(Injury or death, of course, was not the main intent!)
The Russian and his Finnish rival,
Thoughts on winning, not survival,
Both collapsed, the doctors said, a vivid shade of red—
The Finn, I’m certain, felt defeated,
Taken out and quickly treated—
Worse to be the Russian, though, cos Vladimir is dead.

The BBC and others report that the World Sauna Championships have gone horribly wrong. Their task was to endure 110 C (230F) for as long as they could (water being added to the stones every half minute to keep it brutally steamy). After roughly 6 minutes, both men were pulled out and taken to hospital, suffering from burns. Vladimir Ladyzhensky, the Russian finalist, died.

Apparently there were plenty of paramedics on hand, and all athletes had been thoroughly examined by their doctors prior to competition. I can’t blame either the organizers or the participants. Sometimes, it seems, death happens, and there is no use pointing fingers.

The emergence of some feature
Through selection of mutations
Doesn’t happen in one creature,
But across the populations!

Permutations, combinations,
Both additions and omissions,
Lead to phenotype creations
And their rapid acquisitions

Sometimes networks are redundant
And the extras act to buffer—
When mutations are abundant
We don’t always have to suffer!

And environmental factors
May give rise to phenocopy
Where the genes are not the actors
(Yes, it’s all a little sloppy).

So it seems that the initial
View of evolution’s liable
To be somewhat superficial
(Not as much, though, as the bible)

When the pressures of selection
Shape the feature’s distribution,
This determines the direction
Of the change called “evolution”.

PZ writes a very nice post, outlining one of my pet peeves (ok, that’s not his point, but it happens to be a pet peeve of mine), a common misunderstanding about evolution, and (to my thinking) about the broader functional contextualist view, of which Evolution is the most visible example (radical behaviorism is a distant second, but is misunderstood in precisely the same manner that PZ points out for evolution). The misunderstanding is most easily seen in the search for “firsts”–the first human, the first cuttlefish, the first anything. Tony the Fish. Gakky Two-Feet. The firsts. There were no firsts. There were populations.

The emergence of some feature
Through selection of mutations
Doesn’t happen in one creature,
But across the populations!

Permutations, combinations,
Both additions and omissions,
Lead to phenotype creations
And their rapid acquisitions

Sometimes networks are redundant
And the extras act to buffer—
When mutations are abundant
We don’t always have to suffer!

And environmental factors
May give rise to phenocopy
Where the genes are not the actors
(Yes, it’s all a little sloppy).

So it seems that the initial
View of evolution’s liable
To be somewhat superficial
(Not as much, though, as the bible)

When the pressures of selection
Shape the feature’s distribution,
This determines the direction
Of the change called “evolution”.

PZ writes a very nice post, outlining one of my pet peeves (ok, that’s not his point, but it happens to be a pet peeve of mine), a common misunderstanding about evolution, and (to my thinking) about the broader functional contextualist view, of which Evolution is the most visible example (radical behaviorism is a distant second, but is misunderstood in precisely the same manner that PZ points out for evolution). The misunderstanding is most easily seen in the search for “firsts”–the first human, the first cuttlefish, the first anything. Tony the Fish. Gakky Two-Feet. The firsts. There were no firsts. There were populations.

Oh, HATE!!! Distilled to element—oh, hate; oh, hate; oh, hate-oh!
An idealized form of hatred scarcely dreamt about by Plato
I despise the caterpillars that descend on my tomatoes
And I wish that every one of them would die.

Though I hate them with a passion, and I kill them with devotion
There are others who feel differently—one group had got the notion
They could X-ray one while crawling, and examine it in motion
(While the gardeners among us wonder “why?”)

So they took these little bastards (whose existence is appalling)
And they photographed their innards with an x-ray, while they’re crawling,
For the purposes of science (which I still find rather galling,
And I hold a strong suspicion that they’re nuts!)

But they took the fancy x-rays, and they looked inside the critter,
With a particle accelerator acting as transmitter,
(I’m not certain, but the odds are they announced it all on twitter!)
And his walking starts with movement of his guts!

Yes, each movement that he makes begins with innards forward-thrusting
Which the scientists find wonderful—myself, I find disgusting—
They propose a robot model (which, with luck, will soon be rusting)
Where a soft and gushy robot would be best

And the nasty little bastard who demolishes my garden
And who makes my hope diminish, and who makes my anger harden
And who ought to die a horrid death, if you will beg my pardon…
Is the prototype. I think you might have guessed.

****
Ok, the truth is, I don’t know what sort of caterpillar was used by the researchers. But most of the popular press articles are using the Tomato Hornworm as their example.

I hate tomato hornworms. Hate, hate, hate, hate…. On every level, I hate them. I have found a total of one of them thus far this year… which makes me nervous, because how the hell do you end up with one caterpillar?

But.

Researchers have examined them, and have found a new means of locomotion! Rather like me at a buffet line, these caterpillars lead with their guts, and let the rest of them catch up. Different, as I said, from any other walk.

Of course, the possibility of robotics is being explored. I would bet, without a shred of evidence thus far, that the caterpillars’ contribution is being used to deliver ordnance. Just guessing.

A re-posting, of sorts–I blogged about this last year, but now the exhibit has started. Florence’s History of Science Museum (now named, appropriately enough, the Galileo Museum) is giving us the finger. Several, in fact. And a tooth.

When overseas 2 years ago, one thing that fascinated me was the varied reactions to the icons of saints in the various churches. The finger of this saint, the skull of this one, the whole body of this one… a pebble from the place where the loaves and fishes miracle occurred… Some visitors rolled their eyes to all, some were in obvious ecstasy about all, and many drew their own personal lines as to which were worthy of veneration and which were just plain silly.

The exhibit at the Galileo Museum is both– amazing and silly.

Galileo’s middle finger. Appropriately.

The mystery no longer lingers:
Found, at last, two missing fingers.
They both belonged, as did one tooth,
To Galileo. That’s the truth.

The heretic had made a fuss
Supporting old Copernicus;
The Earth, he said, each year will run
An orbit ’round our yellow sun;

A statement, in The Church’s sight,
That could not possibly be right–
So Galileo swore he lied,
And nine years later, up and died.

Nine decades later, scientists
With strange things on their “must do” lists
Removed some fingers, teeth, and bones,
Then laid him back beneath the stones.

For years, his parts, though very old,
Were bartered, traded, bought and sold,
Until, in nineteen-hundred five,
Expected parts did not arrive.

The trading, then, went underground—
Until this year. Now, they’ve been found!
Today, his fans may go and see ‘em
At Florence’s History of Science Museum.

(all I had to change was one word!)