Indulgences

I’ve been neglecting my prayers today — I’ve got all this writing to get done, and I chose to actually sit before my keyboard and move my hands and think with my brain, rather than calling upon the Lord to do my work for me. I’ve actually gotten a fair amount done.

Now comes the part where one might expect some heavenly reward for one’s pious industry, but I don’t believe in that, either. I’m going to have to do something myself … so here I come, Iron Man! We have a late night premiere showing of a first run movie in Morris, so of course I have to go.

It looks like a darned good action movie, too. Popcorn and some good clean late night fun sound like a better event than some po-faced piety at a local church, don’t you think?

Who made the “Beware the Believers” video?

We have a confession! It was made by Michael Edmondson, and it was produced by the people behind Expelled. He wrote to me, and says, “The intent of the video has been questioned a lot…I suppose the answer is that I tried to make something that was funny to me and It’s not really meant to convince anyone of anything.” That’s how I felt about it: it’s amusing, and that’s all that matters — it’s vague enough that it can be read any way you want.

Edmondson has also made a brief sequel.

Note that Stein is wearing a t-shirt that says “Poe’s Law”.

Local reminder!

I mentioned some of the good stuff in Morris this weekend, and some are imminent: at 3:00, it’s Vincent Price in Theatre of Blood at the Morris Theatre; then at 8:00, it’s the Auditorium of Creationist Blather, as Angus Menuge argues with me about whether neuroscience leaves room for god (answer: no. Hey, that was quick!). You Twin Cities residents can still make the movie if you leave right now — we’re about 3 hours away.

Or you could rent the video and watch it at home, and apparently the debate will be recorded, so you’ll be able to watch it on the interwebs later on.

Things to do with your weekend

Plan ahead! It’s going to be a fun weekend!

This Thursday, 17 April, get a head start on the weekend with Virtually Speaking on Second Life. I’m being interviewed at 6pm Pacific Time, and this could be spectacularly entertaining: I’m a total newbie at SL, so I’m going to be getting lessons in how to sit down this afternoon, which tells you that there will be opportunities for major klutzy gaffes at this event. I’m afraid I might turn into a giant flying penis sometime mid-interview.

Friday evening at 7:30 pm, we have the UMM Dance Ensemble performance in Edson Auditorium here on campus. Some of my students are performing, so come on by and support interdisciplinary, liberal arts education by cheering on dancing biologists!

There is a major movie premiere this weekend: Zombie Strippers, starring the renowned thespian, Jenna Jameson. Unfortunately, it’s not playing in Morris, and it does look like the very best movie opening this weekend, so I’m afraid this is probably the weekend to skip going to the theaters.

With one special exception! The Morris Theatre, in a special showing, has engaged a one-time 3:00 Saturday matinee showing of the horror classic, Theatre of Blood, starring Vincent Price and Diana Rigg. Come on, people! Classic 70s horror with a master of the genre shown in an actual old-time single screen movie theater? How can you miss this? There’s also going to be a post-movie discussion of Shakespearian themes in the film afterwards, at the Common Cup Coffeehouse. I’m going to be there — it’ll warm me up for the next event of the evening.

At 8:00 Saturday, in the Science Auditorium on campus, I’m debating Angus Menuge on “Does neuroscience leave room for God”. It may be a bit of a let down after Theatre of Blood — there will probably be no beheadings, sword fights, or eviscerations — but we could have a feisty argument.

I know, Morris is a long ways from everything, but it’s going to be the happening place on the whole planet for a few days. If anyone feels like making the long trip out, send me email, and I can give you directions.

Optical Allusions

Jay Hosler has a new book out, Optical Allusions(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). If you’re familiar with his other books, Clan Apis(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Sandwalk Adventures(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), you know what to expect: a comic book that takes its science seriously. Hosler has a fabulous knack for building serious content into a light and humorous medium, just the kind of approach we need to get wider distribution of science into the culture.

This one has a strange premise. Wrinkles the Wonder Brain is an animated, naked brain working for the Graeae Sisters, and he loses the one eye they share between them — so he has to go on a quest to recover it. I know, it sounds like a stretch, but it works in a weird sort of way, and once you start rolling with it, you’ll find it works. Using that scenario to frame a series of encounters, Wrinkles meets Charles Darwin and learns how evolution could produce something as complex as an eye; talks about the sub-optimal design of retinal circuitry with a cow superhero; discovers sexual dimorphism with a crew of stalk-eyed pirates; learns about development of the eye from cavefish and a cyclops; chats with Mr Sun about the physics of radiation; there are even zombie G proteins and were-opsins in a lesson about shape changing. This stuff is seriously weird, and kids ought to eat it up.

It isn’t all comic art, either. Each chapter is interleaved with a text section discussing the details — you can read the whole thing through, skipping the text (like I did…), and then go back and get more depth and directions for future reading in the science. This is a truly seditious strategy. Suck ’em in with the entertainment value, and then hand ’em enough substance that they might just start thinking like scientists.

It’s all good stuff, too. A colleague and I have been considering offering an interdisciplinary honors course in physics and biology with the theme of the eye, specifically for non-science majors, and this book has me thinking it might make for a good text. It’ll grab the English and art majors, and provide a gateway for some serious discussions that will satisfy us science geeks. I recommend it for you, too — if you have kids, you should grab all of Hosler’s books. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll learn a lot.

Jay Hosler also explains the intent of the project, and you can read an excerpt.

In which I agree with the Jehovah’s Witnesses…for different reasons

Usually, when I read one of these common stories about people denying themselves reasonable medical care for religious reasons (such as the Jehovah Witness’s proscription against blood transfusions, or the Christian Scientist’s insane denial of illness altogether), I find myself siding with the doctor trying to overcome their foolishness, rather than the deluded theists. This one is an exception.

To make it short, a Jehovah’s Witness couple are expecting twins; one of the twins has a circulation defect that prevents pulmonary circulation, meaning it would suffocate to death as soon as it was born and needed to breathe air; they refuse any surgery to correct the problem; doctor gets a court order, operates at birth against the parent’s wishes, and saves the infant.

I think the doctor was way out of line. This is a case in which the parents were fully aware of the situation and knew that the fetus would die at birth, and elected (for screwy reasons, admittedly) to not pursue extraordinary measures to save its life. They had not deluded themselves into believing medical intervention was unnecessary and that magic would heal the child, they had resigned themselves to its death. And until the child has enough self-awareness to actually want to live, I think that is a decision parents have to be allowed to make. If they want that particular baby, they should be allowed to elect to have major surgery, but if they don’t, they should be permitted to allow its condition to run its course, unless the outcome is likely to be survival with serious damage.

The cost of these medical interventions can be prohibitive, and it can be entirely reasonable to decide not to invest money and time into a fetus who has neither autonomy nor unique qualities, nor an individual personality to which the parents have attached their affection. Let them die. Let the parents decide, not a doctor.

The article cites a particularly horrendous case.

In 1990, for example, a woman named Karla Miller went into premature labor at 23 weeks of gestation in Houston. Because a child born that early has a 75 percent chance of death or severe disability, the husband chose not to sign a consent form that would allow resuscitation. But the neonatologist resuscitated the girl, who grew up severely retarded, legally blind, and quadriplegic. The parents sued the hospital for ignoring their wishes, but in 2000 the Texas Supreme Court ruled for the hospital. George Annas, a medical ethicist at Boston University, later attacked the decision in the New England Journal of Medicine, since “the court implies that life is always preferable to death for a newborn . . . no matter how unlikely their survival is without severe disabilities.”

I wonder if that neonatologist has since taken responsibility for the round-the-clock care and various expenses and stresses of that kind of affliction?

One month of stonewalling

In early February, a number of bloggers brought to your attention a peculiar paper on mitochondrial proteomics, a paper which was obviously odd on even casual inspection, containing grandiose claims of a theoretical revolution that were entirely unsupported and ludicrous assertions of evidence for God in the genome. Deeper examination revealed that much of the paper had also been plagiarized from various sources. To the credit of the journal, the paper was quickly retracted one month ago today; however, the retraction was entirely based on the plagiarism, and none of the other failings of the paper were addressed, nor were any of the patent errors in the review process at the journal Proteomics discussed. This is strange, especially in light of the fact that the Warda/Han paper was the most accessed article in the journal. This is not an issue that should be swept under the rug!

Today, several of us — Steven Salzberg, Lars Juhl Jensen, and Attila Csordas — are repeating our call for an explanation of the events that led to the leakage of such an egregiously ridiculous paper into print. Bad papers are a dime-a-dozen, and we aren’t so much concerned with the detailed discussion of the flaws in this one paper as we are with seeing the integrity of the peer-review process maintained, or better, improved. The Warda/Han paper had obvious red flags that marked it as potentially problematic in the title, the abstract, and scattered throughout the body, and it’s hard to imagine how any reviewer or editor could have let them simply slip by without comment, yet that is exactly what seems to have happened.

We want to know how this paper slipped through the cracks, because we want to know how large the cracks in the peer review process at Proteomics are. It’s a journal with a good reputation, and we are not presuming that there was any wrong-doing or systematic failure of peer review there, but we do think that a lack of transparency is of concern: there is no assumption of a crime, but the ongoing cover-up is grounds for suspicion. Let’s see some self-criticism from the journal editor, and an open discussion of steps being taken to prevent such errors from occurring again.

Alternatively, if the journal wants to outsource its quality control to a mob of bloggers, that works, too … but we tend to be less formal and much more brutally and publicly critical than an in-house process might be, and we’re also going to be less well-informed than the actual principals in the review process. Better explanations are in order. Let’s see representatives of the journal provide them.

Big Science

What’s that? Some of you are unfamiliar with the phrase “Big Science,” so freely tossed about by creationists like Ben Stein? Here’s what it means:

Coo coo it’s cold outside.
Coo coo it’s cold outside.
Ooo coo coo.
Don’t forget your mittens.
Hey Pal!
How do I get to town from here?
And he said “Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can’t miss it.”
And I said “This must be the place.”
Ooo coo coo.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
And long cars in long lines and great big signs and they all say “Hallelujah.
Yodellayheehoo.
Every man for himself.”
Ooo coo coo.
Golden cities.
Golden towns.
Thanks for the ride.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Big Science.
Yodellayheehoo.
You know.
I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?
And what about stairs?
Yodellayheehoo.
Ooo coo coo.
Here’s a man who lives a life of danger. Everywhere he goes he
stays – a stranger.
Howdy stranger.
Mind if I smoke?
And he said “Every man, every man for himself. Every man, every man for himself.
All in favor say aye.”
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Big Science.
Yodellayheehoo.
Hey Professor!
Could you turn out the lights?
Let’s roll the film.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Every man, every man for himself.
Big Science.
Hallelujah.
Yodellayheehoo.

I hope that clears everything up.