Every year, L’Oreal selects women who have made significant contributions to community service and awards their organization a substantial grant of $5,000. There are ten honorees this year, and they’ve all got good stories to tell. You also have a chance to vote on one of the ten, and the winner of that popularity contest will get an additional award of $25,000 — read their nominations and you’ll see that they all could use it, and you should vote for whatever cause you find most worthy.

However, I will gently nudge you in one direction, suggesting that if you don’t find that any one cause speaks to you, you should consider voting for Shannon Lambert, who manages a local service called Pandora’s Project, which helps survivors of rape and sexual abuse. We’re a little bit biased, though, since Shannon is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Morris. Just take a look, and if you think her work is good, take just a second and leave one vote for her.

Dan Casey has just posted the first installment in a story about the day Pat Robertson’s bodyguard pulled a gun on him, which is so far an interesting perspective on the obscenely wealthy life of a televangelist. I wish I could afford to build a mighty mansion on an isolated hilltop that I would only visit once a month!

It’s a cruel tease, though. Casey is serializing it: we’ll have to remember to check in every Friday to get the full story.

One of our own, the godless Minnesotan Stephanie Zvan, is going under the knife for removal of some cancerous tissue today. If you’re a useless fool, you might think entreating an imaginary and fickle deity would be the appropriate thing to do, but no…we know that is futile and insulting. However, one thing that isn’t pointless is to leave a few messages as members of a community of caring human beings that we’re looking forward to her return. So go do something social and personal and life-affirming, ok?

Which means we have to start guessing and taking bets on who will win the pretty prizes. MedGadget has a contest — leave a name there and maybe you’ll win an iPod.

I have no idea who will win this year, so I’m not making an entry. I do think it’s about time for Mark Ptashne to get the nod, though.

They’ve got another one entering the fray in November, and they need your suggestions for a name.

It’s a boy, which makes it harder. When we were in those distant childbearing years, I hit up taxonomy for interesting names, but for some reason, most Latin names always sound feminine to me. I was always fond of Ciona (Thaliacea and Styela are also pretty). It just doesn’t work for a boy. It was one of the names I considered for my daughter, Skatje, but my wife squelched it when she saw what a urochordate looked like.

For everyone who rightly complained about the porn ads on the Tibetan Sky Burial post, you can now watch birds devour a dead person via the magic of YouTube, free of distractions.

Again, somewhat grisly: don’t watch this if you feel delicate about such matters as the fact that we are all made of meat.

It looks like one of the staff at Liberty University has been caught.

A Liberty University chaplain is facing drug and burglary charges. Last week, a homeowner caught Scott Ray on surveillance video breaking into a home to steal painkillers. Ray, who is the chaplain for the men’s basketball team and the Director of Convocation, is also suspected in other Campbell County break-ins. In 2005 he was arrested and charged with the same thing. Ray has been suspended by the school and it’s believed he’s checked into a rehab program. Investigators also say Ray has not yet been arrested but additional indictments are pending.

Now if only the rest of the staff could be charged with the greater crime of sowing ignorance…

The fundamentalist community has a strong interest for some bizarre reason in converting homosexuals into heterosexuals. They consider homosexuality nothing but a bad personal choice, and therefore all gay people need is a little Jesus and they’ll switch back to finding the other sex more attractive.

It never seems to occur to them that that implies that their own sexual orientation would then be an arbitrary matter of a trained esthetic, and that that would imply that they should be easily flipped into homosexuality themselves (probably with a little Satan). It’s strange: I’d be rather upset if a group of Baptists tried to brainwash me into thinking Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was a hot dude I ought to fantasize about.

Anyway, the fundies love to cobble up ‘scientific’ studies that back up their claims of successful conversions. These typically defy common sense and the results of work by real psychologists, but that doesn’t stop them. Their latest result claims a program of Christian counseling has a 53% success rate. Unfortunately, even in the press releases that crow about this answer, they have to admit some bothersome details. Like that their sample size was less than a hundred, that over a third of their subjects dropped out and refuse to talk to them, and that even those they managed to retain in the study are very evasive and reluctant to talk to the researchers, all stuff you’d expect of a program that doesn’t work in any way other than instilling guilt in their subjects.

Worst of all, credible scientists don’t accept their results, for an amusing reason.

“They selectively apply rigorous scientific standards,” he said. “So when it comes to examining the evidence that sexual orientation change can occur, they apply extraordinarily rigorous standards, and those standards allow them to disregard significant evidence that sexual orientation change can occur. That’s what happens with our study. They, I think, invalidly applied several methodological concerns to dismiss our study.”

Curse you, Science, for your rigorous standards and methodological discipline that prevent us from getting the answers we wanted ahead of time!

So…anybody with an institutional subscription care to send me a copy of this paper? My university’s subscription only lets me see articles in this journal after they’ve aged for a year.

Smith HF, Fisher RE, Everett ML, Thomas AD, Randal Bollinger R, Parker W (2009) Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix. J Evol Biol. 2009 Aug 12. [Epub ahead of print]

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Already got it, thanks everyone!