Quick! I’m late in announcing this! The Tangled Bank will appear on The Radula this Wednesday — send links to your science writing to me or [email protected] before Tuesday!
It would be a terrible slander of decent Neandertals…but otherwise, we probably wouldn’t notice much difference.
… well not today. I learned very little today , but generally, here are some interesting things I’ve picked up in class:
-If you sever a cat’s cerbral cortex from its hindbrain it can still walk on a treadmill (in a harness that compensates for the poor feline’s lack of balance). This was the topic of one of PZ’s many tangents.
-One way to inhibit the HIV virus is to make a drug that targets a protein our cells make. The key is to identify a protein the virus needs but that we do not. CYC202, a cyclin-dependant kinase inhibitor, may be one such drug.
-“HIV virus” is redundant, but hey, so is the genetic code.
-If you race flatworms in a maze, grind up the fastest ones, and feed the product to flatworms having yet to try the maze, you might find that they run the maze faster than their non-cannibal counterparts. Of course, you would consider that flatworm may simply be highly nutritious, because you’re a scientist, and that’s what they pay you the big erlenmeyers for.
-Badger culling. That’s right. Badger. Culling. It’s used to decrease badger/cow contact in Great Britain as badgers function as a bovine tuberculosis infection reservoir for cattle.
-EtOH and H20 are miscible. Whew… and to think I almost made myself an acetone martini…
…I would use a machine gun rather than a pistol.
You’ve still got time — I’m in the Ridgedale public library, and Hector Avalos is getting ready to give his talk on “How archaeology killed biblical history”…come join the crowd if you’re somewhere in the Twin Cities area.
You’re too late now! I saw several familiar faces at the talk, and there was a huge crowd — Minnesota Atheists has to be growing, because every meeting I go to is larger than the last one. We got a good discussion of the increasingly evident failure of archaeology to back up any of the claims of the Bible. Whereas once upon a time, serious scholars argued that portions of the Bible actually echoed real historical events (and even today, many less informed evangelical/fundamentalist Christians still do), virtually all of it is considered ancient myth-making nowadays. No Exodus. No empire of Israel spanning a big chunk of the Middle East. No Solomonic fortress building. No Solomon. No David. Quite possibly no Jesus, and definitely no primary sources describing his existence. I thought the comparison of Solomon and David to King Arthur quite apt — they were inventions after the fact, legends built up to illustrate beliefs about a past golden age. It was subject matter that is quite different from my usual approach to debunking religion, so it was useful stuff … and I picked up copies of Fighting Words: The Origins Of Religious Violence(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and his latest, The End of Biblical Studies(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), so I can do a bit more digging into the details.
Hector Avalos gets up into the Twin Cities now and then (his drive from Iowa is about the same length as mine from Morris), and if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, I recommend it!
Last night, in my talk, I said that I didn’t think religion was necessarily a force for evil. Then, this morning, I was sent a link to some convoluted religious sophistry that made my lip curl in revulsion. Maybe I was wrong.
The link will take you to an article by Orson Scott Card in which he complains about homosexuals. That probably tells you all you need to know; Card has this reputation for letting his mormonism hang out in the ugliest ways possible.
We had a good time at St Olaf tonight — it was a small group, I gave a short talk, and we had lots and lots of stimulating conversation afterwards, along with my favorite pizza (jalapeno and pineapple). I’ve tucked what I sort of said below the fold.
They don’t like it. But they love Jesus. At least, that’s the message I get from this interview with Dahmer and Chuck Colson’s fear of Richard “Maddog” Dawkins.
Are these the best celebrity endorsements of Christianity around?
Squeeeee! I like totally love Robert Hooke, and now you can read Hooke’s notebooks online. The broadband version is phenomenal — it’s like leafing through the 17th century.
I have arrived in beautiful Northfield, MN (motto: “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” I expect a placid audience for my talk tonight). My first impression, right after passing St Olaf College, was an odd one: what is that strange chocolatey aroma I’m smelling everywhere? Shortly afterwards I came upon a gigantic Malt-O-Meal plant, and all was explained. I guess smelling like Malt-O-Meal isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a college town, although there is one better: the UO campus at Eugene used to occasionally smell intensely of fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, thanks to a bakery down the street from it.
I have to mention one of the unfortunate things about Morris. It used to occasionally reek like yeasty sour beer, from the ethanol plant on the edge of town. They seem to have cleaned up their act in the last few years, and we rarely get that odor anymore. There were a few days this summer, though, where the wind was just right and we got treated to the stink of the local pig farms, which is not at all pleasant.
I think I’ll take the scent of breakfast cereal any day.
