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!

This year, Texas will require its students to take a Bible course. In the supposedly secular public schools.

This could be a bad thing if all the schools bring in their local Southern Baptist minister to teach fundagelicalism…but it would be a great thing if the teachers brought a properly skeptical attitude towards it. Well, except for all the teacher lynchings that we’d be seeing around October.

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A correction from the Texas Freedom Network:

Just a quick note about your post on Bible classes in Texas public schools. Unfortunately, the article you linked to in your post got it wrong – public schools in Texas are NOT required to offer Bible courses. In fact, we were successful in 2007 in changing that bill in committee so that high schools could choose whether or not they want to offer elective courses about the Bible’s influence in history and literature.

The Texas attorney general has ruled that the law, as written, does require that something about the Bible’s influence in history and literature must be in the curriculum somewhere, but it doesn’t have to be a separate course. Of course, many social studies and literature classes have long included samples of sacred writings from Christianity and the other major religions and explain their influence on various cultures. So we don’t think the law will change much unless school districts decide to offer separate Bible courses.

Watch this movie to get a little taste.

Sam Harris wrote a recent op-ed in the New York Times criticizing the nomination of Francis Collins to head the NIH. As you all know, newspapers limit the amount of space you can have, so that was the very limited version — he has now posted a lengthy critique of Collins on the Reason Project.