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My friend (who is getting a Masters in library science, I would like to point out) had an interesting rant on his blog about, among other things, English majors and genre fiction versus “lit fic”, from which I quote most gleefully:
“Contrast people having weighty moral issues and physical travails while fishing with people having weighty moral issues and physical travails on spaceships. You should be keeping a simple fact in mind here, which is that fishing, to be perfectly honest, is REALLY FUCKING BORING, and that flying around in spaceships fighting aliens is REALLY COOL.”
It is funny and it reminded me that I myself have not ranted about this subject (in writing, anyway).
( Read more )
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Average number of cells in your body: 10^13
Average number of bacterial cells on or in your body: 10^14
You are less human than you thought...
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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!
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Nov. 21st, 2005 @ 06:15 pm
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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.
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Sep. 27th, 2005 @ 11:28 am
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Well, I think I’ll be enjoying three out of my five classes this term, and that’s not a bad percentage. Organic chemistry lab is going to suck, but we knew that, didn’t we. Shouldn’t be as bad as the lectures two years ago, but oh god, WHY does the professor have to be Dr. Walker?
He’s a nice enough person. Unfortunately, he talks in a monotone, and sometimes does that annoying thing people do where they suddenly lose volume and trail off towards the end of a sentence – except when he does it, you know you just missed a critical part of some formula you need to complete the lab. He also tricks you by going into way too much detail about inane things:
“So, it is important to understand the importance of boiling points, that is, the point at which a substance begins to boil. It is important. You can usually study the boiling point of a chemical by heating it.”
And then, just when you think it’s safe to block out what he’s saying, he will, without changing tone or giving any other warning, throw in a sentence fragment that is extremely relevant and important:
“…and another interesting thing about boiling points is that you will have a mandatory online quiz that you must complete before midnight tonight that will determine your entire grade for this class and if you fail your mother will die and you will find that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade please turn to page 42.”
My dislike for the class, however, probably stems more from the fact that it’s 8am to 11am Tuesday and Thursday. It was probably a bad way to start the term when, today, I rolled out of bed at 7:30, swore groggily, got ready in 8 minutes, ran all the way to the 4th floor lab… and it was empty. Found a sign on the door that said, (to paraphrase), “hey, just kidding, class is actually in another building today. A couple blocks away. Up three more flights of stairs. We could’ve sent out an email to let you know before hand, but didn’t really feel like it. Too bad for you. Ooh, you’re not late, are you?”
So I went to THAT building… and the classroom was empty. It turned out that everyone else was getting lecture packets from his office or something. Eventually everyone else arrived and I wasn’t late after all… but geez. Too early, especially for a class whose content and professor I already dislike. That’s my point. Goodbye. It’s nap time.
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