From Physorg.com, Mycobacterium vaccae(a soil bacteria) was fed to mice and the mice were tested in maze runs to see if it increased learning ability. The increase in learning was only temporary, however. Read the rest of this entry »
So I just joined Facebook. And I also belong to Twitter, Digg, Linkedin and MicrobeWorld. Would you call Netvibes one? Anyway, I’ve been reluctant about joining facebook because I have this impression that I have to be more proactive about being social. I have to acknowledge what “my friends” are posting and doing on there. For anyone following me on this blog, I’ve been at this for four years and haven’t broken a hundred posts yet (but soon). My just not chatty. So we’ll have to see how this goes.
So it’s just not that Obama is acting like Bush on certain things, it a bit more personal. What happens when you find out that people you admire are bat-shit fucking crazy? So I’m reading about a celebrity “atheist” who seems to me to hate science. Especially the branch of science that I love the most, my little buddies the microbes.
Obviously I disappointed that someone doesn’t live up to my standards. So now I feel like a little kid that whining that there’s no Santa. Because after all, that’s life, where you have to deal with crazy Aunt Tilda in the attic.
From Yahoo News, so Georgia police and the FBI are going after people who help terminally ill people die. As the mother of one of the victims said, “If they helped John to die, that is what he wanted. I would never find them guilty for helping him.”
I see no compelling reason for this to be a crime.
From the Kalamazoo Gazette opinion page, so the city commission did the right thing and added language for protecting the LBGT community. So the “morally police” decided that they have to “protect” Kalamazoo from from the gays. My understanding is that Kalamazoo has a rather large LBGT population for a city its size out in the hinterlands. What pisses me off is that these fundy fuck, bigoted assholes can go around and try and take away basic human dignity and I’m considered a bigoted asshole because I loathe the fact that they can get away with this bullshit. And why? ‘Cus it’s in the Bible. Well they know where they can stick their Bronze Age Mythology.
Just to Add: Came across this from Science Daily.
So FL has accepted science standards that require teaching about evolution. And a hero of mine has recently said that evolution shouldn’t be taught until collage because it’s so complex. With the resent discovery, the heat shock regulator involved with folding proteins, specifically those involved with growth., Dr. Woese has a point. Just teaching the basics, the transitional fossils, the genetic similarities, etc, has been problematic.
It has been 20 years since I graduated. And I have been following the news about my alma mater. So this gets me thinking that just twenty years ago, this play would not have been even considered. It also gets me thinking about the openly gay friend of mine. Although I don’t know how much of a friend I was, since I don’t say anything about the hateful things people were saying about him. It leaves me feeling like I didn’t do enough. I hope he has a life partner and is happy.
It also reminds me, when I asked why being gay was bad(I don’t quite remember the exact question). And the answer was the Bible says so. End of discussion. Of course being a closeted atheist, that wasn’t good enough. But I didn’t pursue it.
From Boston.com, The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute has fired a guy for not working on a project that he was hired for because it dealt with evolution. The courts will decide this.
The thing that I have trouble understanding is these ultra-Christians that spend the time, effort and money to get advance degrees in the sciences. And willfully remain ignorant of the basic science they are studying. To me this seems that they would have no passion for the subject that they are studying. For me when I read about some new thing that they uncovered about bacteria, I become enthralled by the need to get the details of this neat, new discovery. The idea that there is a stunting of curiosity, where the wonder of the universe is shunted aside by dogma, when curiosity should soar boundless, is just wrong.
For me science is magic. From the tiniest bacteria to the spiraling of gases in deepest space, there is a beauty and a beating of the heart that is indescribable. The recent hypothesis about the origin of life is an example. Mica may have acted as cell walls, where advanced organic chemistry could have taken place, leave me breathless.
From Physorg.com, A professor has looked at various stories from ancient Rome and Greece and has linked ghost stories with death and its rituals. I like scary stories and movies so knowing that ancient peoples have a liking for the same is not too surprising. And leads me to wonder what stories were told about the Neolithic fire before going to sleep. I can imagine a storyteller setting the scene of a great hunt and during this pursuit, one of the hunters is killed. And his fellows stop immediately to gather up some flowers and get his belongs to place in the burial chamber that they create. And this storyteller reminds the listeners that it is selfish to butcher the meat before the hunter is put to rest so that his spirit will not come to frighten and plea to go onward.
So the First Freedom First is doing a blogswarm against theocracy. And I saw this piece on PhysOrg.com, and I thought to comment on it.
Studying twins, the link between good behavior and religion is examed. There seems to be a strong link that behavior has a genetic component. So there is a balancing between the environment(nurture) and genetics(nature) that determines how “good” a person is. I think how this relates to religion, is that a person is more likely to be of the same religion as his/her parents. And this relates to goodness by the moral teachings of religion. However, those how have left religion or who were raised without religion are just as influenced by the genetic and environmental factors related to goodness. So that certain moral absoluts are connected to being human and not necessarilty related to religion.