This poll cannot stand

Oh, come now. Are they just taunting me, waving a bit of succulent red meat before and begging me to bite? Should topics such as creationism or intelligent design be taught in public schools alongside the theory of evolution? 85% say yes. I cannot believe that 85% of the population are that stupid, although it is being hosted on the American Patriarchy News Network, which would tend to bias the sample downward.

Gah. This came out garbled before, and you would not believe how long it took to get in and fix it. The scienceblogs server is rapidly becoming intolerable…which, of course, is exactly what the DOS bastards want.

Short takes from the mailbag

I get tons of news tips all the time, and I can’t use them all — so here’s a quick dump of a few items from the let’s-laugh-at-religion file.

Dignity denied

Today’s must-read article is by Dan Savage, whose mother recently died of pulmonary fibrosis. It’s personal and painful, and it also touches on the political. Washington state has a ballot measure coming up that would make it legal for doctors to prescribe lethal doses of medication for the terminally ill, and Savage’s mother, when her disease reached a crisis stage, had to choose what kind of painful death she wanted to face.

People must accept death at “the hour chosen by God,” according to Pope Benedict XVI, leader of the Catholic Church, which is pouring money into the campaign against I-1000.

The hour chosen by God? What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man–and medical science–my mother would have died years earlier. And at the end, even without assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her choices. Two hours with the mask off? Six with the mask on? Another two days hooked up to machines? Once things were hopeless, she chose the quickest, if not the easiest, exit. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.

Did my mother commit suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.

I know what my mother would say: The same church leaders who can’t manage to keep priests from raping children aren’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of our lives.

If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have a right to say so. Same for gay marriage and abortion. They oppose them for religious reasons, but it’s somehow not enough for them to deny those things to themselves. They have to rush into your intimate life and deny them to you, too–deny you control over your own reproductive organs, deny you the spouse of your choosing, condemn you to pain (or the terror of it) at the end of your life.

The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one–each one–because it offends your God.

Somehow, putting on a silly clerical collar gives people the feeling that they can dictate how others will be allowed to live and die. They want to meddle, and worse, they want to make decisions based on the worst kind of reasoning — that the voices in their heads told them how it was so, that it was written down so in ancient books, that their myths tell them of codes of conduct necessary for an imaginary reward after death. That is no way to live a life, or end one.

Jellyfish gettin’ it on, baby

This is too much verisimilitude. The movie below is of the mating behavior of the jellyfish Carybdea sivickisi, and the first thing you’ll notice is that the scientists have set it to good old classic porn music.

The second thing you’ll notice, that I found annoying, is that they used too high a power objective to film it, so everything is jerking everywhere and none of the participants stay in the field of view for any length of time. Why is it that porn is afflicted with so many gynecological close-ups? Come on, set the mood, show us whole individuals instead of fragmented zooms of body parts.

Let’s switch to radio

Things are getting ugly at scienceblogs right now — you’ve probably noticed all the errors in making comments, and those of us on the inside are struggling even more to get through to put up posts. Rumor has it that we may be undergoing some kind of denial-of-service attack — we’re short of information ourselves, since our tech people are too busy tearing their hair out and pounding on recalcitrant iron to give us updates. We’ll know more when everything is fixed. Soon, I hope. Until then, have patience and try not to post too many duplicate comments.

We may have to switch to old media. I’ll be on KPFT radio tonight, at 10:30 pm Central, along with some other guy named Phil Plait. I think we’re going to talk about the Republican version of supporting science, which consistes of complaining about overhead projectors and bear DNA, while endorsing candidates who believe Jesus would hunt dinosaurs from his helicopter.