|
Group of 10(?) years olds coming back from the bowling alley.
Girl #1: "Hey! I know this place! We almost bought a house here."
Girl #2: "Why didn't you?"
Girl #1: "Well, Dad said he didn't like the neighborhood, but Mom said that's because he's intimidated by people who are actually good at landscaping."
|
|
Of all the responses to the recent HHS idiocy about contraceptives, this is my favorite.
"... millions of Americans presently work at gyms, swimming pools, parks, or other recreational facilities where they may be required to encourage or collaborate in exercise by women. Research published last year in a British journal of gynecology demonstrated that, as with caffeine, "exercise early in pregnancy is associated with an increased risk of miscarriage." Again, to avoid abortifacient risk in women who are not yet pregnant, the draft regulation must guarantee the right to withhold any collaboration in exercise by women of childbearing age."
|
|
Here's something funny!
 (I'm the one holding the squid)
|
|
Court rejects 'intelligent design' in science class
John Scalzi reminded me of this the other day, and handily provided a link to the ruling.
I enjoyed seeing not only Common Sense winning in a trial, but to see the issue (which I know I tend to get emotional about) articulated in clear, presise, legal language by a party without an agenda is pretty satisfying.
Let me give you an example (from the ruling):
"An Objective Observer Would Know that ID and Teaching
About “Gaps” and “Problems” in Evolutionary Theory are
Creationist, Religious Strategies that Evolved from Earlier
Forms of Creationism" (p18).
There. Let us have no more of this "Intelligent Design is science! Really! And it isn't at all related to creationism!" stuff.
That, or the numerous references Buckingham's (the school board member who tried the hardest to get itelligent design into his school's biology classrooms) complete, power-abusing, self-rightous, lying, bullying insanity:
"...there arose [during the trial] the astonishing story of an evolution mural that was taken from a classroom and destroyed in 2002 by Larry Reeser, the head of buildings and grounds for the DASD. At the June 2004 [school board] meeting, Spahr asked Buckingham where he had received a picture of the evolution mural that had been torn down and incinerated... Buckingham responded: “I gleefully watched it burn.” ... [Buckingham] demanded that the teachers agree that there would never again be a mural depicting evolution in any of the classrooms and in exchange, Buckingham would agree to support the purchase of the biology textbook in need by the students" (p 108).
"Subsequently, at the August 2, 2004 meeting, Buckingham opposed the purchase of Biology [legit science textbook], which was recommended by the faculty and administration, unless the Board also approved the purchase of Pandas [creationist textbook] as a companion text...At trial, Buckingham testified that at the meeting he specifically said “if he didn’t get his book, the district would not get the biology book.” (p 110).
Wow. That was a lot of quotationating. I will stop now. Happy Holidays!
|
|
|
Nov. 21st, 2005 @ 06:15 pm
|
|---|
|
Sometimes I just really enjoy class. It's all about the little amusements. For instance, in genetics last week we were given the question, "Just how inbred is Prince Charles?"
Did you know you can answer this very specifically? All you need is a pedigree, which we have, and a simple equation: namely, that an individual's level of inbreeding, (F), equals 1/2 to the n-1th power. Where n = the number of different pathways a gene could have traveled from his parents' common ancestors to him. This defines inbreeding as how many loci, or sections of your chromosomes, are autozygous, aka "identical by decent" aka EXACT SAME copies. (For example, Mom inherits gene "A" from Grampa Joe. Dad has the same Grampa and also inherited gene "A" from him. Their kids could now get two copies of the exact same gene).
Ok, that was a bit geeky. To sum up, Ol' Chuck isn't as inbred as you would think after looking at his family tree. His F value was only 0.00438. For comparison, the child of a brother and sister would have an F value of 0.125. (The highest possible F is 0.25, which would be the product of a union between mother and son or father and daughter. Always fun.)
Now when someone mentions, with a little laugh, how inbred the royal family is, you can say, "actually, Prince Charles is only autozygous at point zero four percent of his loci." The look they give you may SEEM to be incomprehension, but it is actually respect and awe. Trust me.
|
|
Label on my bag of granola:
"PLEASE NOTICE: This is a crunchy product. If in any doubt about the condition of your teeth, please consult a dental practitioner."
|
|
So they're doing construction on parts of the building where most of my lectures take place, and the power went off almost exactly on the hour, when I happened to be in the computer lab killing time before class working on a lab report. Yay for anal-saving-every-30-seconds practices.
Any loss was made up for, though, because the class was lectured by the highly amusing Dr. Webster. I've never seen someone who could seem so laid back and yet twitchy at the same time. He has a habit of jerking his chin up and down while lecturing and staring fiercly at walls. These aparently involuntary head spasms just add to the character. He also has a typically bizarre sense of humor, shared by most PhD's that I've met, and it mostly works on his class because, well, we're bio-nerds ourselves.
(Although, still not as amusing as Dr. Gramn Rowe, the gay, cross-dressing, bar-hopping, "so, I see you've got your fisting gloves on", ecology professor who, I've heard, sleeps in his office on weekdays because his house is too far of a commute.)
While we waited for the lights to come on so we could see to take notes in our windowless lecture hall, he told us amusing stories from his pre-doctorate days. Aka: 'The tales of the horrible things zoologists did to learn more about animals'.
For instance: Before the days of easy DNA sequencing (ie, before the mid-90's), if you wanted to discover what hormone was doing what inside an animal, you had to find out where it was being made/secreted, and then collect enough of that tissue to isolate the hormone. What this meant was lots n' lots of animal parts, since the secretetory tissue is almost always tiny.
A colleague at his old school, I think it was Liverpool University, in one study collected and dissected hundreds of camel heads to get their little pituitary glands. He himself spent an entire year getting at the sinus gland in crabs. He ended up dissecting _ten thousand_ crab eyes - under a microscope. If that whole 18 months had gone to waste, i bet he would have gone insane (which is up for debate anyway, I suppose). Lucky for all of us, that particular study of his actually worked: he discovered a couple hormones, and his published report became relatively famous in crustacean circles. Heh. crustacean circles, I like that image.
His point, at the end, was that he published that paper in 1991. In 2001, you get one sample of tissue, and in three weeks you can have all the contents or whatever sequenced. Job done. I'm sure the NHS Home for Blind Spider Crabs is disappointed.
My favorite was the story of a study at Bangor University looking at quail hormones. The Dr. in charge had three post-grad assistants in his research whose jobs was to cut the heads hundreds of live quail (using a "little quail guillotine"), extract whatever gland he needed, and discard the heads; infamously in a collection bucket. Two of the assistants later had nervous breakdowns. Dr. Webster said somthing like: "It probably had something to do with the fact that the heads continued to blink at them even after they'd been lying in the bucket for awhile."
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cyborgsuzy's journal