More feminist procrastinating

I am craving pizza today. And yesterday. I think I am starting to go into winter torpor.

I was reading ridiculous stuff about whether or not Republican chicks are hotter than Democrat chicks (Democratchicks?), an offshoot of the "Babe Theory of Political Movements" (which is a joke, no?). While this is an inane topic (because obviously Democrats are hotter - unless you're big into the hairspray and pumps and glazed expressions, ha ha) what bugged me about it the most is that the underlying presumptions of the whole discussion are:

1) The primary role of women is to advertise the party, thereby making the party desirable. Like using supermodels to sell beer.

2) Men act - women adorn. (Men are subject, women are objects.)

3)Men are the Default - women are Other.

4) Women are judged on their looks over any other metric.

I'm so not being paranoid about this. Maybe I will eat some pizza to ease the pain.

I also read this lame NYTimes magazine piece by Maureen Dowd which was all "Blah blah blah, feminists wear Birkenstocks and so I can't get dates, blah blah, can't 'have it all' blah." There's an excellent piece by Katha Pollit in the Nation which is much more worth reading than the M.D. story. Can I just say, I have never had trouble getting a date because I'm too smart and accomplished or whatever . . . Maybe this is because I would never consider dating someone who didn't dig the smart girls. Maybe this is also because I only know other grad students, who tend to be liberal and bookish. Still, though.

But I don't want to get going on patriarchy and advertising. I am already a lazy enough grad student. There are any number of other things I ought to be doing.

By the way, I don't have Ann Coulter stylee highlights or stick-insect legs and I am damn hot.

P.S. Shameless self-promotion: Tomorrow is my birthday!!!

Uh-oh

A dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 947 F.2d 682 (3d Cir. 1991), arguing that a Pennsylvania that required women seeking abortions to inform their husbands should have been upheld. As Judge Alito reasoned, "[t]he Pennsylvania legislature could have rationally believed that some married women are initially inclined to obtain an abortion without their husbands' knowledge because of perceived problems--such as economic constraints, future plans, or the husbands' previously expressed opposition--that may be obviated by discussion prior to the abortion." Chief Justice Rehnquist's dissent from the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision striking down the spousal notification provision of the law quoted Judge Alito's dissent and expressed support for Judge Alito's reasoning.

More about Alito here.

You should read this

post about how EVIL Halliburton and its subsidiaries (who get no-bid contracts in Iraq and Louisiana) are.

Unlike yesterday, during which there was snow, today is warm and brightly sunny. I was going to work on my Evolution talk today but I think it is my patriotic duty to go for a bike ride instead.

Snow!!!

Big fat clusters of flakes, falling steadily from a sky like feathers being shaken out of a dirty white pillow.

In other news three beers and one shot of Sambuca is enough to make me feel r-o-u-g-h the next morning. Last night at the cheesy piano bar I met a liberal Navy nerd who works on nuclear reactors and was really happy to talk to other liberals. It seems there are not tons of Nation readers in the Navy. Go figure. Was not prepared to have a good time with the Navy boys, who were my friend's brother and co-workers, but I actually did.

So excited about Libby being indicted. Fingers tightly crossed for Rove to go down. What's shitty, though, is that the Watergate felons spent all of like 18 months in jail - but if you get caught smoking weed you'd get several years in jail. Someone explain to me why this makes sense.

Absolute vindication of the feminist analysis

I was reading over someone's shoulder on the bus the other morning and this interview with Stephen Lewis, the Special Envoy to the UN for HIV/AIDS. This response in particular I wanted to share.

What is being done on the ground to address the vulnerability of women?

"I see very little change on the ground. There is little progress in building a legal infrastructure and getting laws in place to protect the property and inheritance rights of women. It moves from inertia to paralysis. We need the toughest laws imaginable against sexual violence and marital rape, and we need ways to enforce them. We need to encourage the social empowerment of women, whether it’s putting girls in school or starting income-generating projects. But I just can’t get over how slowly this is happening. What we have is an absolute vindication of the feminist analysis: when you’re dealing with the inability of men to relinquish power and authority, then you are in real trouble. "

Dreams

I am very interested in dreams. I've been having very long, narrative dreams the past week or so. Luna suggests that it could be hormones. Maybe it's the cold weather. Who knows?

Below are some dream-related links. The top one I saw today, the bottom ones I remember from meeting this guy Matt Wilson at MIT. He showed me a rat and some mice with what looked like old fashioned computer chips plugged into their heads. He said that the rats transfer their maze memories from the short-term to long-term memory storage during sleep by replaying the maze dream sequence in slow motion. They could see the same patterns of neurons firing while the rats slept, and if they woke them up in the middle of the sequence, they performed far worse than controls on the same maze at a later time. (Whether the rats were actually "dreaming" about the maze we cannot know.)

I've certainly had the experience of dreaming about skiing, or playing a video game, or plating cells (I know) after a long day of doing one of those things.

As for dream symbolism, I think that it is largely personal in nature. I think we can interpret dreams by our emotional responses and the stories our brains use to make sense of the random images. I bet there are many different types of dreams - some rat maze dreams, some dreams that are wish fulfilling (e.g. making up with a friend, confronting an enemy, finding something lost), some that are problem solving (similar to wish-fulfilling?), some that are about anxiety or fear (stage fright dreams are classic for me), some that just happen to come from the movie you watched or book you read.

I have classes of recurring dream themes that have certain emotional tones and personal meanings for me, such as: finding extra rooms in my house (positive) or exploring hidden passageways/rooms in another house (interesting but disturbing), elevators that go very very fast (discomfiting), driving cars (when I was little), airplanes crashing (post-9/11), being on a quest for something (very narrative), demon dreams (very scary - usually the "demon" looks very normal but I know that there is Evil nearby), exploring Dream Amalgamation Cities (bittersweet), and musical dreams (featuring singing of known or made-up songs, sometimes dancing, usually exhilerating). Oh, and of course sex dreams! I am not always myself in my dreams; sometimes I vacillate from character to character or to omniscient observer.

I used to write down my dreams when I was a kid but now I don't need to do that. I remember my dreams most mornings, if I try even a little, and some dreams I remember more clearly than things that actually happened. Certainly they are more interesting than real life, anyway.

Memory sources of dreams:
Investigators since Freud have appreciated that memories of the people, places, activities and emotions of daily life are reflected in dreams but are typically so fragmented that their predictability is nil. The mechanisms that translate such memories into dream images remain largely unknown. New research targeting relationships between dreaming, memory and the hippocampus is producing a new theory to explain how, why and when we dream of waking life events.

Rats dream of mazes:
The scientists had the mice perform specific tasks in a maze that produced very distinctive patterns of brain activity. When they repeatedly saw almost exactly the same patterns reproduced during sleep, they concluded the rats were dreaming about running through the maze.
Wilson Lab

Time for a nap now.

Why is it called the "World" Series, anyway?

So, I'm not a big baseball fan - not a fan of any sports, really - but I was quite pleased that the White Sox won last night (sweep!). Nothing was going to top last year's Red Sox Extravaganza, and the Buccos didn't make it, so I didn't really care so much about the World Series this year. Still, I am pleased for the following reasons:

1) The White Sox haven't won in 88 years, so that's nice for them.

2) Pitcher Mark Buehrle looks like my friend Coco-loco from uni.

3) That meant that the Astros lost and Barbara Bush looked all pissed off. Ha ha! (GB Sr. just looked heartbroken, which made me almost feel bad for him - but no.)

Lake Effect Snow

Clear and cold today. It hasn't snowed yet, which makes maybe 2 out of 5 of my years in New England where I didn't get snowed upon in October. Last year the first snow was October 11th, according to my classmate who had to play soccer in it, and I think the last snow was in mid-April.

My esteemed colleague from the UK has noted that Americans are inordinately fond of talking about the weather. Especially snow storms. This is true. In fact, when we had this conversation in a bar, the bartender came over and started telling us all about the winters in Buffalo. They get some serious snow in Buffalo. Lake Effect Snow. Typically my home town is too far south for Lake Effect Snow, but we get it occasionally. Boston, on the other hand, gets Nor'Easters, which are almost as good. In fact, we had at least three blizzards last year. The first one lasted all night and day and . . .

About Me

Perhaps now is the time to give away something of how I got to be the way I am - my Lamarckian evolution to a weirdly comfortable and paradoxical yet strangely satisfying spiritual place.

My family is, for the most part, Catholic. Not super Catholic, but Catholic enough that I got the Sacrements (Baptism through Confirmation) and went to CCD every Tuesday through eighth grade. CCD was pretty boring. I always wanted to confess to having broken one of the less popular Commandments (e.g. I have been worshiping Quetzalcoatl) but I never had the guts. I hated face-to-face Confession - it was extremely creepy. The priests' hands always smelled like cured meat. There was and is something about celibates that spooks me. I wasn't really friends with the other kids, either, and even if I was I certainly wasn't going to get into a metaphysical discussion with them. That happened between me and my mom. The only time CCD was remotely interesting was in eighth grade, where we sat in a small room and actually started to talk about real topics of faith and theology. The room smelled of cheap red candles, though, and plastic flowers. That depressed me - the decor was just cheap enough not to be nice, which was somehow worse than nothing at all. That would at least have been monastic and pure. It's hard to find God with the scent of cheap plastic in your nose. But I liked the stories of the saints and the long history of the Church (depsite it not all being good), and the ritual and heady symbolism of Mass. The music sucked, however; the aural homolog of the cheap plastic replacing the real lilies. Add the Church's position on birth control and women and I was disenchanted pretty early on.

Meanwhile, every day after school, from first to fifth grade, and for a month every summer I was immersed in Jewish Community Center programs. I know my Shabbos prayers, can dance to klezmer music, and to this day I have trouble eating pig products (exception: pepperoni - I love pepperoni). The decor of the JCC, while heavy on the pink and light blue and brass "donated by" plaques, was also much less depressing than that of CCD. I'm not judging religions by their decorators, but trying to give a sense of the . . . gestalt that I had in different places as a child. You also get to like having sex in Judaism and sex is even better than pepperoni.

I found Judaism beautiful and rich; I liked the community and the tradition of scholarship, although I found things like random dietary restrictions to be extraneous. All the niggling rules and regulations! But Judaism has Tevyeh, and challah, and summer camp! For a little while in early high school I wanted to be Hassidic, for the sense of security it seemed to offer (as many people join cults at vulnerable times in their lives). That wore off after a day or two for a number of reasons. In high school, most of my good friends were Jewish. I envied their belonging to this community. I could sit in and sing along, but I could never be part of it. I never really felt a deep connection to the Catholic church, either, as I disagreed with so much of it's dogma so there was still always that sense of being a nomad, of being a visitor, of belonging to nothing.

The main spiritual events of my youth happened at the First Presbyterian Chruch Camp, where I went for two weeks every summer from age 9 to age 15. This camp was much more religious than my Jewish day camp, to the point of having Bible study daily and a "no purpling" rule (boys are blue, girls are red, you see where that's going). There was rock climbing, spelunking, white water rafting, ropes courses - all with Christian themes and overtones. ("Jesus, please help me jump off this stupid platform!") It might have been stifling, but I had a great time there. The music was terrific and the counselors were genuinely nice people. Bullying and cliquishness were frowned upon (a welcome break from middle school). There was time for quiet reflection in a place of natural beauty. I had several transcendent experiences which I will not discuss here. But I also questioned and questioned during Bible studies and at other times. Are all the Jews going to Hell? Adam and Eve aren't real, are they? How could I synthesize what I learned and felt at camp with what I learned and felt at the JCC? And all the while, I'm supposed to be Catholic?

My sense of community was Jewish - my heart was touched by Presbyterians - my family was Catholic . . . I don't remember feeling confused, per se, although I felt that familiar sense of being an alien, of dropping by, of not belonging but taking an affectionate interest. When I was fifteen I wrote in my journal, "Went to church this morning. I don't think I'm religious. Well, I think I have my own religion - the God Religion, which is just me and God and the universe and everyone."

Imagine this, try. There are three people who you love, you respect, and they are each confident that their way of doing things is the proper way. To choose one means rejecting the others. If one of them is "right" that means the others aren't, they can't be. But you have clicked with each of them in different ways, have learned what they have to say, have seen both wonderful and troubling aspects in each of them, so they can't all be "wrong" either.

At church camp they warned against "sampling", i.e. picking and choosing what to believe out of the Bible. You had to swallow the whole thing, whole. I couldn't do that, but my spiritual experiences there felt no less real. I was going through the motions of Catholicism - was it spritually dishonest, then, that I edited the Testament of Faith during Mass? ("One holy Catholic and apostolic church" - well, yes, I certainly believe it exists . . . "the Resurrection of the body"? - hm, I'll be very surprised if this happens.) At the JCC I learned about the Chosen People, of whom I was not one no matter how often I ate the bread and drank the wine. I should have been having a spiritual crisis, but actually I wasn't. That was just how it was.

Instead of a crisis or a conversion, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what, at the deepest level, these different faiths were saying. What things were the same between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism? Each of them had aspects that felt right to me and things that felt wrong; but I could dissect them and find the commonalities, the natural laws of religion, excised of the window dressings of names and traditions. It was precocious self-tutelage in comparative religion. I felt that I had a unique vantage point from which to study the questions of God and religion; a privileged postion, and the only price was my own sense of alienation. A small price to pay for a higher truth. I was a scientist even before I became a scientist.

I came to many various conclusions, some of which I have discussed briefly elsewhere. My mom and I agreed with the Dalai Lama (more on him later) although we didn't know it at the time: there are many paths up the mountain to God. Religion binds communities together and imparts moral codes. The divine is all around, in everything, and therefore every living and non-living thing should be loved and respected; in loving and tending to each other and to nature, we are worshiping, thanking, and giving praise to God.

Later I learned more about Hinduism. I was immediately smitten with the idea of karma, although the mechanics of reincarnation make it highly suspect as more than a metaphor. I came up with a sort of meta-reincarnation concept, where every person, every creature, is an expression of a cosmic soul. I liked the Hindu duality of many gods being aspects of One God.

I also came to some conclusions about the search and the many levels of truth. One day, in college, I picked up a book of quotes from the Dalai Lama and was astounded to read my own idea about the four levels of knowledge, in a slightly more lucid form. Turns out I was a Buddhist all along! Who knew?

I am not actually a Buddhist, of course, for similar reasons as to why I am not a Jew or a Catholic. There are many paths up the mountain to Enlightenment . . . I can argue on all sides of the mountain (the atheist side, too) but to pick one path that has been marked out, one trampled, worn, and rutted path? How can I do it?

I trust that God - or whatever, since the concept of "God" is only a symbol for a transcendent idea - is cool with that. I really do.

Belated Canadian Thanksgiving

Boomy mentioned this outrage at our wonderful Belated Canadian Thanksgiving Feast of Deliciousness: Target "respects the diversity of its team members" or some shite who don't feel like filling prescriptions for Plan B emergency contraception. Links aqui, aqui, y aqui.

Canadian Thanksgiving feast, by the way, was terrific. I will tell you what lovely things Boomy and Brand made as I did my laundry in their almost-grown-up laundry-having apartment. I will do this is verse reminiscent of the Dudley House Review. Ahem:

Butternut squash
____________soup
______creamy and bespeckled with tart
_______________cranberries on
_top
to start and chard-
___________ -itwasgreen-
______ -therewasgarlicinit-

we ___ next ____ partook
________ of Cornflake Chicken
_______ (i ate some crispy cornflake bits
____________ from Boomy's plate)

pears! i brought them,
_______________ pears!
___________________ poached!
fig compote snug in dugout bellyhollows
_______________ parmesan cheese,
___________ their pearish modesty veiled

nectar of the vine - from
___________ another of Her Majesty's Commonwealth-

and we
______ were

sated.

[snap snap snap snap snap]

Engineer: "Cells are so weird!"

Seriously, though, about cells . . . they are not little perfect machines in any way.

If a cell can do something the easy way or the hard way, it probably does both, plus three ways you haven't even thought of yet. Even the old DNA-->RNA-->protein "central dogma" is not, as it turns out, the whole story. Every step can be (and usually is) another level of regulation. There's mRNA localization. There's RNA interference. There are micro RNAs. There are noncoding RNA sequences that regulate protein translation. There's DNA methylation, histone methylation/acetylation, chromatin remodeling. (Genetics joke: What the hell happened to my gene expression? Oh, it's chromatin remodeling.) Proteins flop back and forth between conformations and the cell exploits the differences. Feedback loops and threshold effects are the rule, rather than linear pathways - there's noise in the system - a cell is not like any kind of machine that we are familiar with in the macro world. We are only beginning to formulate the mathematical tools to be able to describe biological systems.

We have way too much to do before we can understand cells as they are, without turning them into little catechisms. As much as I love the extended cell-based metaphor, and I really do, I think it cripples one to project one's expectations or prejudices onto biology - that this or that is "purposeful" or "perfect"; it narrows one's scope for creative thinking. ID person might say, "Well, but you are projecting evolutionary assumptions onto your biology all the time!" And while on one hand they would be correct, this is because there has not been any better explanation that describes what we see better than natural selection. The theory has been fine-tuned since Darwin and since the first geneticists - some things that were not thought possible have been reexamined. But these are technical issues rather than wholesale paradigm shifts.

Becoming dogmatic is a problem any time a field establishes itself, and it's sometimes hard to swim against the dominant paradigms. I am almost willing to concede something to the ID folks, like Ben who comments below, in that perhaps there is some order, some something, that we simply don't know how to study yet . . . germ theory of disease would have been impossible to observe directly before microscopes (although it could be indirectly tested by experiment).

But then I think - no, we are not able to go beyond materialist methodology, at least at this time. And the supernatural is not falsifiable!

Finally, I must stress again: ID is not about science. It is about God.

Weather to set the dogs howling and the madmen to rattle their chains

Raining today, and gusty winds strong enough to set off car alarms.

I have been having strangely vivid cinematic dreams this last week. This morning there was a story set in a castle type of place, about a man who was secretly a cannibal, who killed people and made them into "pork sausage". He was trying to woo another character, who was alternately a man and a woman, but I (the shifting dream-I) knew his secret. I didn't know if I wanted to tell the poor person who had been unwittingly eating human flesh, though. The murderer-cannibal man was then eating daisy flowers on a plate. I confronted the cannibal, saying, "You're a fox!" (In case I was wrong I could pretend I had been saying he was hot.) When I said it, though, he did indeed reveal himself to be a fox - his face transformed into a mix of fox and squirrel, he pouted and shrank and grew furry. He had been a fox all along. "It all makes sense," I said, running down the hill, "the 'pork', the daisies . . . " I went up to the fox, put a board on his chest, and stepped on it.

What the heck does that mean?

Don't You Forget About Me . . .

On a lighter note, I watched The Breakfast Club last night, thanks to Netflix. I used to have very lascivious thoughts about Judd Nelson (aka "John Bender") when I was little, in spite of his oddly-shaped nose. Oh, that hair! Those eyes! The angst! Phroar. I would totally have made out with him in the closet and given him my diamond earring.

Then I went to bed and read my sophomore year diary for a while. I used a lot of exclamation points back in the day. Shout-outs to brookburg, Boomy, and a lot of people who I haven't thought about in a long, long time.

Just because something looks like a naturally evolved molecular complex . . .

This is cool - a nanocar!

This nanocar was intelligently designed. However, unlike the (oh, no, not again) bacterial flagellum, we know who designed it: a group of humans, who are referenced at the bottom of the page.

Like the B.F., on the other hand, it exploits certain particular properties of the physical world, such as the shape of carbon atoms and the ability of things to spin on axes.

Instead of Mister/Miz Designer (whose name cannot be spoken) emulating Shirai, et al, in advance, isn't it more likely that Shirai, et al, have emulated successful adaptations that occur naturally and take advantage of the laws of nature?

Anyone who studies biology - especially cell biology - can tell you: it's a complete mess. If this shit was designed by a designer, the designer was on acid at the time. And yet, out of this jerry-rigged hodgepodge it is still possible to decipher some interesting fundamental mechanisms, to make incrimental (and the occasional huge) steps toward understanding how things work.

Cool Nerd Link

This discussion of the establishment of circadian rhythm is just fascinating.

If/when I have a baby I am totally going to graph its habits. (But not nearly to the extent of poor Trixie's parents, at least one of whom is a leetle bit crazy. Asperger's perhaps?)

Update: Crusader Language

I would like to update my casual investigation into the use of overtly religious Crusader language by anti-evolutionists about Darwinism and its proponents. I think this is an interesting area to explore in more depth (although obviously I haven't really got time to do that since I am supposed to be working on this little thing called my thesis, a.k.a. dissertation).

Here are some egregious examples from that bastion of intellectualism The American Spectator.

While neither Rosin nor Goodstein are up to the task of explaining evolutionary theory convincingly, they do realize the sacred duty of stopping this scientist [Behe]. He's wandered much too far on to the Darwinists' turf.

Garbling the elite's dogmatic schema, Goodstein, in the Wednesday edition of the Times, had Behe challenging the "Darwinian theory of random natural selection." Random natural selection? No, no, Ms. Goodstein, nature selects not randomly but necessarily, choosing random mutations that happen to prove useful, under Darwin's theory. What is nature? And how does it choose with such incredible precision and marvelous efficiency?

Let me refer interested readers to a previous post, where I try to make the distinction between "evolution" and "God". There is almost no point dissecting the obvious ignorance of the last three sentences, which completely miss the point of what "natural selection" means. Perhaps this is the fault of the word "selection", which reminds one of picking the nicest oranges from the bin, rather than the effect of natural (rather than supernatural) pressures on the viability of various organisms.

. . . the elite's favorite argument for evolutionary theory: the scientific establishment says it is so and no reasonable person would question these omniscient scientists.

Whereby scientists become priests, or worse, false prophets?

*****

A few more examples, just to drive my point home.

from The Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture
Darwin's Critics Are No Bigots, in Contrast to Certain Darwinists
By: Giuseppe Sermonti
October 19, 2005
Yet, in the small nation of Italy, when, a few years ago, [Letizia Brichetto Arnaboldi] Moratti [then minister of education] dared to propose a change in the teaching of evolution, there was an academic and popular uprising, a commission of respected citizens was named, and it was decided that the teaching of the scientific perspective (ergo Darwinian) should be imparted as soon as possible and should be monocultural, as a secular bible, as a catechism for children.

from Science's New Heresy Trial
by Gene Edward Vieth

A Smithsonian-backed editor is defrocked by the priesthood of science for publishing an article on Intelligent Design.

I will give one thing to William Dembski, which is that he refrains from this kind of language. Well, bravo William Dembski. Based on the content of his writing, though, he still promotes a very obviously religious, anti-materialist agenda:

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the
complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the
God of any religious faith or philosophical system. The task for the Christian who accepts
intelligent design is therefore to formulate a theology of nature and creation that makes sense of intelligent design in light of one’s Christian faith.

Even so, there is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of
Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled
atheist. This gives intelligent design incredible traction as a tool for apologetics, opening up the God-question to individuals who think that science has buried God.

The Wedge

And I quote, from The Wedge Document, as read several times in the Dover trial:. (Emphasis mine.)

"The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialist science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a wedge that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the thin edge of the wedge was Phillip Johnson s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991, in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe's highly successful Darwin's Black Box followed Johnson's work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design. Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist world view, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

Weighty versus trivial

I'm feeling tired of writing and thinking about serious things, such as the nature of the universe, and what is science, and the general ignorance of humans. I am also wishing that I could purge my brain of information about celebrity marriages and other trivia. I am embarassed that I know anything about Demi and Ashton or Brad and whoever - I didn't seek to know these things, they were thrust upon me by media-saturated culture and I couldn't avoid them!

It's like how the jingles for matress stores are taking up valuable real estate in my brain that could be - should be - being used for better things. I could sing you at least three matress commercials right now, but I have no idea who the president of Spain is, for example.

Shit, now I have a matress song in my head.

Apparently, the concept of Halle Berry is stored in a single neuron that fires when a subject is shown a picture of the actress, even if she is dressed as Catwoman. I am sort of annoyed that Halle Berry, even though she's a fine actress, gets a whole neuron, whereas I often can't remember people I've met in the past year. I don't want to be giving random celebrities whole neurons! I don't want "Jennifer Aniston" to be a web of mental associations indelibly encoded in my brain.

Here, this is cool and in no way serious, unless you start thinking about a) the mechanisms of visual perception or b) the pervasiveness of advertising.

Bono, WTF?

In the continuing story of how Bono has sold his soul to the devil (see below) I offer this compelling evidence.

Pgh Unprepared for Zombie Attacks!

Yay! I love it when The Onion gives my hometown a shout-out!

Nature of Belief

The nice thing about this being my blog is I can write whatever I want on it . . . So here is my response to a thread of commentary between me, springy, and Luna about the nature of belief and science. (below)

okay - i get your point, i think, springy. there is more than a little bit of an element of "belief" in involved in science, especially biology bc it's really complicated. i guess rejecting supernatural intervention outright (like good materialists) is sort of a belief (although i maintain it as a different cetegory of belief from belief in interfering deities) . . . in that if something seems supernatural, we wrinkle our brows and keep doing experiments or thinking up new models until we can explain it.

AFA Exposes the Nefarious Truth about Girls Inc

Of course, American Girl itself is a separate company, unrelated to Girls, Inc. except now by webpage and the seventy cents on every bracelet. I checked out the Girls, Inc. website, and it is exactly as I have told you. Below are some direct links, so that you can see them for yourself.

American Girl website offering "I Can" band to benefit Girls Inc.
American Girl to benefit Girls Inc
Girls Inc. homepage
Man-hating lesbo commies
Girls Incorporated supports a woman's freedom of choice
Girls Inc eat babies
Convenient access to safe, effective methods of contraception
Girls Inc are big sluts
Girls and Lesbian, Bisexual, and Questioning Identities
Girls Inc want to tutor your daughter in the ways of Sappho
Free your mind: The book for gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth and their allies.
Seriously
Girls and Sexual Health (with sexual orientation on page 3)
Girls Inc have gonorrhea because they are whores

I hope you will take time to let American Girl know they are making a terrible mistake by supporting the pro-abortion, pro-lesbian organization, Girls Inc.

Heaven forbid young girls learn about math and science, reproductive health, and sexuality! Next thing you know, we might start lobbying for the right to vote, and that's America down the old toilette. Oh wait . . .

His Word is true and pure, and we cannot go wrong if we follow Him! Starting in the Pentateuch (Genesis through Deuteronomy), we see that God made woman for man. As much as the feminists hate the idea, it is true. Conversely, man was made to protect, cherish and nourish the woman. Men who are not doing that and are not loving their wives as Christ loved the church are covenant-breakers. Women who refuse to stay home and obey their fathers or husbands are also covenant-breakers. They are inverting God’s created order, which is God-Man-Woman-Animals.

"Letters from Jennie" No me gusta Jennie.

You've got to be fucking kidding me.

And finally: Fetishized (yes I said fetishized) costume drama outfits.

No comment.

Evolution is not the materialist version of the Holy Spirit.

I want to reiterate a point I made in my Great Lost Post about evolution.

"Evolution" is not a substitute for "God". (No matter how the creationists think.)

Evolution is not something that organisms do; it's something that happens to organisms as a group over time.

Evolution is a name for the process of how organisms become different from their ancestors.

But reading creationist (or ID) tracts, the language that they use makes it sound like, to materialists, Darwin is the Son and Evolution is the Holy Ghost. They are limited to a theistic mindset and so they re-cast scientific materialism in their own terms. I really think we - the intellectuals and other thinking people - need to call a big loud bullshit on this kind of obfuscation.

Deism?

From my point of view, it's incompatible with scientific materialism - or whatever - to think of there being a divine entity that exists outside of the actual world, as gods are considered to be in the Western tradition. However, I don't think it is necessarily opposed to reductionism to consider that there could be a . . . force, or spirit, or something that IS the universe, rather than being seperate from the universe. The more Eastern view of the divine sets aside difficult theological questions like, "At what point did the creator stop interfering" or "How come God isn't being nicer to me, if he's such a nice guy?" I think those are facile questions.

Why Waste My Breath?

[Note: Had written a looooooong spiel abuot why bacterial flagella aren't irreducibly complex, what natural selection is, why Behe is a dork, etc., but accidentally deleted it. There went my afternoon.]

There is almost no point arguing with ID proponents, as they are not going to change their minds, no matter how much evidence is laid before them. This is because their faith is immune to education.

They can't grasp that science - materialism, if you want, or empiricism - is fundamentally different from religious conviction. It's apples and oranges, but they think that materialism is a belief system akin to theism (albeit one that is immoral - a topic for another time). We can see this in the language that they use. "Dogma of Darwinism" - "orthodoxy of evolution" - "anyone who dares question it [natural selection] at all has to be 'whipped' and burned at the stake of so-called 'progress' and 'scientific fact'."

This is crusader language, not the language of natural science, nor even the language of philosophy.

HP Love

So, if I found true love in the world of Harry Potter, I would be:




Hey, Alan Rickman is kind of hot. I think it's the voice. And - and - in his defense, I think Snape just needs some love, you know? I could fix his hair up for him. I bet he'd be passionate, yet tender, with the right woman. Clearly he is an accomplished wizard; he just never had the opportunity to go to college and join a theatre group, or smoke a lot of pot and talk about Salinger. I think he'll be redeemed in the last book, I really do.

If I were lovin' the ladies, I would be Mrs. Hermione Granger.

I may once have been Hermoine Granger. In middle school I used to start a lot of sentences with, "Well, actually . . . " Note to kids: this does not make people like you.

Work Ethics and Moral Dilemmas

In terms of my personal work ethic, I am definitely a sprinter rather than a marathon runner. Last week was spent recovering (i.e. checking my email, taking long lunches, trawling the deep ocean trenches of the www) from the month before, which consisted of mad data scrabbling, proposal ping-pong with PI, and the joys of importing large images into Word, but culminated in a very satisfactory thesis advisory committee meeting. Having crested the TAC meeting mountain, I am now confronting another alp of work directly ahead and I feel like camping out at the bottom of it while I gather my strength for the next big push.

Is that lame? I might just be making excuses for being a big huge slacker. When I read other lady lab rats' blogs they all seem like they are doing a lot more work than I am.

I guess you're not supposed to admit it when you're being a slacker. Or "collecting your thoughts" - or whatever it was that you call sitting in the coffee shop for two hours in the morning. I wonder: if I actually worked every day, how much more I would get done?

Downside of being a good bullshitter is that it's too easy to keep bullshitting . . .

I picked a good committee. I have a range of ages and degrees of famousness, as well as a balanced sex ratio. My two female committee members are very cool. The younger has become my collaborator (I have a tiny mentor-crush on her), and the other reminds me of my mom in terms of being nice but no-nonsense. They asked me, while my PI was out in the hall and we were waiting for the third, a grandfatherly figure with a big white beard, how I was doing. I mentioned that I'd been having a bit of difficulty with my confidence level this past year and getting, possibly, just a little too emotionally invested in the success of my Western blots.

Was this a tactical error? It is a bad move to reveal any weakness to one's superiors?

They were very nice, though, and cautioned me against the "Impostor Syndrome" - that's the one where you're sure that some day everyone is going to find out that you've been faking it the whole time . . . I managed not to cry (being quite touched as well as emotionally labile) and the outcome of the meeting did give me a boost of confidence.

But then, before the meeting, my PI went back into the conference room and it was my turn to wait in the hall. While they all talked about me. It was the most excruciating five minutes (five hours?) ever. I had to sit in the hall in the polka-dotted chair while three tenured and one associate professors talked about me.

Did my PI tell them I was a slacker-slash-sprinter? Did they tell him I was snivelling like a little girl? Is my PI going to feel compelled to give me additional pep talks, replete with personal anecdotes, to bolster my confidence? It's too horrific even to think about.

I didn't mean to talk about this, but I guess I will leave it in, and go tend to my hungry cells.

LARRY KING: All right, hold on. Dr. Forrest, your concept of—how can you out-and-out turn down creationism, since if evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?

(Aug 24, 2005)

Reason number 27 it's a good thing I'm not schizophrenic:

You know when you post a comment on a blog and you have to enter in those random sequences of letters? Wouldn't they be excellent vehicles for coded messages from a higher power/aliens/the CIA?

Is it funny or worrying that I think about this?

Fascinating Fun Facts of Fish, Fats, and Fptotatos

Hey Mummy,
All the talk of omega-3 fatty acids made me think of you craving fish - fish oil, more precisely - when you had rheumatic fever. Which makes sense seeing as the omega-3 FAs in fish are known to be anti-inflammatory. I also remembered you craving raw potatos - I remember you saying they had to be RAW.
So, I looked this up and in the last year there have been several papers about this subject!
Did you know that raw potato has been a folk remedy for treating inflammation forever (e.g. a raw potato on a black eye, or the juice of a mashed raw potato for arthritis)?
It turns out that there is a lipoxygenase, an enzyme that modifes lipids with oxygens, in potatos which converts an omega-3 fatty acid called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) into bioactive lipids that, through various pathways, are potent anti-inflammatory signaling molecules! One newly characterized lipid product called is protectin D1. It seems to get rid of T cells (induces apoptosis), the accumulation of which in tissues leads to chronic inflammation. Since the potato lipoxygenase is an enzyme, boiling the potato would denature it and kill its activity - thus it has to be raw to be effective.
So, your clever body was telling you to load up on the precursor as well as the enzyme you needed to convert it into bioactive anti-inflammatory molecules when you had rheumatic fever!

My mom agreed that this was pretty amazing:

Hi Honey,
No, I didn't know anything about the folk uses for potatoes, but isn'ti t fascinating? How can a lump of dumb meat (ie a body, without any brain/thought mediation) "know" what it needed? It's not like I'd had experience with toxic inflammation before, so there was no bank of experience (even unconscious experience) to draw on....and the last time I looked, neither my gray or white matter has any experience in analytic chemistry to draw upon! There's no oogga bogga, as I'm pretty sure that whatever mechanism is involved is pretty primitive, and shared with other lumps of meat (ie cats, dogs, frogs, etc) as a basic leg up in survival. Still, it is fascinating.

Bodies are very cool. There's so much that goes on in your brain that you don't know about - it sits there doing wordless analytic chemistry and advanced immunology while you think you're thinking about "Survivor", and then when it's done it manages to translate all that into "Hey, I want fish and raw potatos!"

Good excuse for yielding to chocolate cravings, eh?

HARRIET MIERS: POPULAR WITH ALL OMNIPOTENT DEITIES!

adapted from http://www.family.org/cforum/news/a0038155.cfm

Support for President Bush's new nominee to the high court, Harriet Miers, came from different quarters today. Both Bhaktivedanta Institute Chairman Dr. James C. Dobson, Ph.D., and Mier's guru, Swami Ronald Key, assured initiated devotees today they believed the 60-year-old White House Counsel and former Dallas lawyer would make a good Supreme Court justice.
Dobson told his nationwide broadcast audience today his support of her came with "fear and trepidation" because of the implications of doing so.
"If I have made a mistake here," Dobson said, "I will never forget the blood of those cows and chickens that will die that will be on my hands to some degree. That's why I don't take this lightly."
He acknowledged the Miers nomination had "angered and disillusioned many Devotee initiates, many of my friends, many whom I love and have worked with for years."
But asking if it makes any sense that President George W. Bush would sabotage the base of the Hare Krishna temple who worked and gave and supported him, Dobson answered his own question with a resounding—"I don't believe it!"
Bush's legacy will be the people he puts on the Supreme Court, Dobson said. The noted Devotee broadcaster answered several of the charges that have been raised against Miers, including one involving her position on meat-eating. In 1989, she answered "Yes" to a poll question by the Cattlemen's Beef Board that asked, "Do you believe that beef-eaters should have the same gustatory liberties as vegetarians?"
"You know what? I do," Dobson said, affirming her response. "I don't believe that non-vegetarians should be denied a job. I don't believe that they should not be able to open a restaurant. I don't believe that they should not have the same rights everybody else does. I just don't believe that there should be special rights given to carnivores that are not given to everybody else."
Dobson cited many of Miers' positive characteristics, including her devotion the Vedic scriptures. "She is a deeply committed Devotee," Dobson said. "She has been a believer in Lord Krisha since the late 1970s. I know the person who led her to the ISKCON center. I know the temple that she goes to. I know it's a very conservative temple. I know that she is an incense-burning member at that temple. I know that she has deep convictions about things. I have talked at length to people that know her—and have known her for a long time. Some of them have been a close personal friend of hers for 25 years. I trust these people because I know them—I know who they are and I know their character and I know what they stand their heart for Krishna."
The nominee's guru, Dallas-area Swami Ronald Key, told CitizenLink that he believes Miers will make an excellent Supreme Court justice. He said she's not only highly accomplished, intelligent and conservative, but she also has a deep Krishna consciousness. He's heard her testimony—and watched her in action.
"When she finally came to the place where she wanted to be initiated, wanted Upanayana, you knew this was what she wanted to do," he said. "When she committed her life to Krisha—she did. It wasn't just a formality. It wasn't just like joining a church. She made that firm commitment."
He added: "My advice to traditional Devotees who care about these issues the way we do, is to stay cool, keep your powder dry, don't assassinate the character of this woman before you know who she is."

from Salon.com today, re Judith Miller:

Suspicions that Miller had crossed an ethical line and grown too close to her sources increased after the waiver letter she received from Libby was disclosed. That letter ended with this bizarre, highly personal passage: "You went into jail in the summer. It is fall now. You will have stories to cover -- Iraqi elections and suicide bombers, biological threats and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers. With admiration, Scooter Libby."

You went to jail in the summer
It is fall now-
You will have stories to cover,
(meter falls apart here)
Out West, where you vacation,
Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dust and shiver-
Ripe plums are falling-

That is a weird ass letter. From a man who calls himself Scooter.

The IgNobel awards - too funny.

Happy belated Canadian Thanksgiving, by the way.

From NewsMax, via Wonkette, via Boomy.

On Sunday, October 16, a unique political event will take place.

Unique being defined as PROOF THAT THE END TIMES ARE REALLY HERE.

At a concert of the legendary rock group U2, Senator Rick Santorum will hold a fund-raising event for one night only.

Hold up . . . U2 . . .and . . . Rick Santorum???

Rick "that frothy mix" Santorum, shit-streak senator from Pennsylvania???

And Bono???

As in the case of Santorum, Bono's religious convictions inform his activities.

The U2 leader shared some of his faith perspectives with the author of the book "Bono in Conversation." He said, "It's a mind-blowing concept that the God who created the Universe might be looking for company, a real relationship with people."

Santorum told "Christianity Today" that "faith is a source of morality; it's a source of virtue; it's a source of reason. It's a tremendous influence on my worldview."

End times, my friends. Boomy has been warning us about the evils of Bono for years now. I did not believe her. She held up a sign on the traffic island, yet I scoffed. She prophesied the true nature of Bono, but I believed her not. I now believe. Bono has gone over to the dark side. The end times are so upon us, it's not even funny.*

Next year in Canada, my people . . . next year in the Holy Land.

*Irony alert.

Ew ew ew!

Just like a woman
Thousands of men are shelling out $6,500 for hyper-realistic dolls that answer all their needs -- and don't talk back.

By Meghan Laslocky

...

Like many born in the sun sign Cancer, Sidore is a homebody, but then, she couldn't leave the comfort of the bed she shares with Davecat even if she wanted to because Sidore is a 100-pound solid silicone Real Doll.

I want to blame the patriarchy for this silliness.

Officially Fall

It's officially Fall now - chilly and wet. I have a cold. Time to clean my lab bench and desk, as they are in an appalling state, and learn about Arf6.

Just finished "Bee Season" and it left me in a fog. The combination of that and my head cold made all the noises on the street just a little too loud, the movement of the bus a little too jerky, the squeak of wet shoes in the elevator enough to set my teeth on edge. There was an older man sitting next to where I was standing on the bus with thick silver hair, in a rich blue suit. When the bus stopped started to get right up, oblivious to the throng in the aisle. He reached down for his bag and in straightening up head-butted me in the side. I gave him a look which was meant to say, Excuse me, dude, you are not the only person on this bus, you know. Hmph!

It was just because he looked so used to completely owning the space he occupied, with his suit and his Vidal Sasson hair, that I wanted to chasten him, I in my wet jacket and scuffed boots, I who am used to riding buses. He apologized, looking up at my contemptuous face. Maybe I am imagining his expression of puzzled embarassment as my left eyebrow and lips contracted, but then I felt a bit guilty and uncharitable for having glared so.

Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate

Conservatives have already used the storm for causes of their own, like suspending requirements that federal contractors have affirmative action plans and pay locally prevailing wages. And with federal costs for rebuilding the Gulf Coast estimated at up to $200 billion, Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable.

"We've had a stunning reversal in just a few weeks," said Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group in Washington. "We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening."

Full story from NY Times here

Asked by host Matt Lauer if sexism might be playing a role in the Miers controversy, [Laura Bush] said, "It's possible. I think that's possible. . . . I think people are not looking at her accomplishments."

Uh, yeah.

Ah, Cambridge. Ah, Cantabrigia.

The other night I saw "Good Night, and Good Luck" at the cinema in Harvard Square, which in retrospect was not the best place to have gone to see that movie.

It was a good film, but it was not a comedy. There were a few chuckle-inducing lines and a lot of places that called for wry smiles, but it simply was not a funny movie. Which is okay. It was good. But not funny.

So why, oh why, were the moviegoers in Harvard Square cackling like jackals after every fucking line???

Was it because it was in black and white, and being in black and white lowers the comedy bar? Possibly, but probably not. Was it because people in 1950s gear are inherently comical? They kind of are, but not that funny. And a lot of guys in the audience had those same silly glasses on anyway.

Was it to let everyone else know that they, the guffawers, "got it" - that they "got" the parallels of McCarthyism to Our Own Time, how clever of them? Yeah, it kind of was. Oy, Cantabrigia.

But it was also, I think, the hysterical laughter of people whose impotent screams have become trapped in their throats - the manic shouts of "Amen!" that erupt from the windpipes of the choir when the preacher is on a roll.

Still, it was super annoying and I kept missing bits of dialog when Mister Hyena to my left started barking at things that totally weren't funny.

I am a little in love with the guy who played Edward R. Murrow, and I see Oscar all over his performance. I recommend this film on DVD, or in a theatre that is not filled with academics and aging hippies, for maximum viewing pleasure.

* * * * * * * * *

Next topic. I was reading a book today about sociopaths, or psychopaths. Apparently, as many as one in 25 people are sociopaths, although most sociopaths never do anything that will get them into major legal trouble, so they remain unidentified. I was sitting in the bookstore trying to think if I knew any anyone who lacks a conscience. I couldn't think of anybody I knew - certainly none of my friends! I have a low tolerance for unpleasant people, though, so I feel like if I have met any sociopaths in the past few years I would have stopped associating with them pretty quickly, as I would have found them either creepy or boring.

Then I read a chapter about a woman who was a "covetous psychopath", which is a person who targets people she envies for some reason in weird ways to undermine or humilate them, and I realized that I very well might have known a person just like this in high school. In fact, it is possible that I was actually the target of such a person! My friends will think I am being paranoid about this, but they thought I was being paranoid at the time and it turned out I was right, which only goes to show that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you.

Even looking back I am not sure what I could have done to have provoked this girl's ire, unless it was the fact that she had mild allopecia while I have very thick hair. There were boys involved, of course, but it's bizarre because I was younger than she was and very young looking and kind of a nerd. Okay, a big nerd. Much smarter than her, and with nicer hair, but short and boobless and dorky - so it never made sense to me why she went out of her way to mess with me, of all people! Possibly it was a combination of the first boy, on the class trip to Spain, and the fact that I always found her off-putting, even when she wasn't my nemesis; she seemed to need to be the center of attention in a creepy manipulative way. She wasn't really even in my social circle, this girl. And frankly, although I had some really lovely friends in high school, my social circle was not so prestigeous as high school cliques go. The boys involved were nice enough, too, but they were hardly the catches of the school. But I guess not all sociopaths are equally ambitious.

In addition to plotting to get [certain boy] away from me (direct quote, I will never forget: "I bet you didn't know I planned the seduction"), she went out of her way to rub it in my face during gym class (why? why bother doing this?) which made it seem like it was less about the boy than it was about scoring points off of me. Then she creepily invaded my extracurricular activity (the school play) and sucked up to various people (especially one of the leads, who was a very odd guy and not even a great friend of mine, but all of the other people who were my great friends would have had no interest in this girl becuase she was dumb and boring) and hosted the cast party, and basically haunted me like a foot stink for an entire year.

It was all very frustrating and perplexing at the time, but her being a covetous psychopath makes it make tons more sense - aside from the part about why on earth anyone would have coveted anything about dorky fifteen-year-old me in the first place. Now I have enviable qualities - boobs, academic achievements, adult relationships - but in high school? Dude, if I was in any way cool back in the day, that is news to me.

So was this girl a sociopath or just a huge bitch? I don't actually care, I just hope no one ever takes against me like that ever again. Yuck.

Having decided not to go to lab all weekend, and having nothing that I should be doing, I am at a loss for what to actually do today. I could do laundry and clean my flat but that doesn't sound like fun. It's freezing cold (compared to summer - if it were this temperature in March I'd be gleeful) and spitting tiny icy drops of rain, so a long bike ride is out.

There are actually several movies out that I'd like to see, including the one with George Clooney (who is my secret lover), Wallace and Grommit, and some others that I forget right now (who's geeky enough to see Mirrormask with me? hm?). Movies are a good activity on a dreary, drizzly day, especially a day after which one has finished the new Terry Pratchett book and has no new fiction in her house.

By the way, my most awesome cousin, Ethyl, was totally right about the new T.P. Terry, you are a guru among men. Seriously, though, I think Terry Pratchett is one of the cleverst people in the entire history of the world. I have yet to pick up on any glaring errors in his knowledge of physics (at least compared to my own, which admittedly is not vast) and if all of your lessons on human nature and morality were gleaned from the Discworld series, you would be living a pretty content and fulfilled life.

Committee meeting over! Was fine! Beer now!!!

PKL PIX PAK PAX FAK ARF CRK CSK SHC SRC RAC RAS . . .

Cell biology is an infinite parade of three letter acronyms.

Urgh - thesis advisory committee meeting today. It will be over soon, and in a few hours time it "won't have been that bad". But I am having a tough time mustering up the requisite self-confidence, and every time I try to I want to crawl under the table and curl up in a little snivelling ball.

I used to be good at giving talks - I liked giving talks - I don't know what went wrong . . .

This explanation, during the Proceedings of the National Cause for Embarassment, of why science and theology (by a theologian) is concise and brilliant.

Mmmm, iced coffee at the Diesel is so good. It has a chocolatey taste. Speaking of tasty drinks, I recommend the apples-and-honey vodka shot, which was invented by Dr. J. last night.

After excessive sturm und drang I sent out my dissertation progress report. I am now procrastinating my little heart out over making my presentation, which I have got to practice tomorrow for my advisor, who takes no prisoners where presentations are concerned, and any members of my lab who would have liked to watch the Christians get mauled by the lions. I mean, who are working on adhesion and motility and might have constructive criticisms to offer.
Preparing for a presentation is a thousand times worse than actually giving it. I hope I will be saying the same thing on Friday afternoon. Gulp.

Happy Rosh Hashana to all the Chosen People! And to the High Holiday gate-crashers, like me, as well.

Question: Has there ever been any group in history that didn't consider itself to be the Chosen People? Like, was there ever a tribe who sat around their yurts saying to themselves, "Dude, how cool are the Gormblang tribe! I heard they were chosen by Schmendrick the Yak God as his special favorite tribe . . . man, I wish he'd picked us! Well, hey, props to the Gormblangs, anyway - I reckon Schmendrick knows what he's doing, being God and all, so who are we to argue with His Will? I guess I'll just maybe go see if the Gormblangs need someone to do the washing up."

All the ancient language seem to have a word for themselves which means "human" and a word for furriners that means "not quite human".

So while I love many aspects of Judaism - not least of which are honey cakes, Seder, and my friends - and I support the right of Israel to be a nation, the whole "God said I was super special" and "By the way, God also said I could have this land" is a bit . . . thin.

But, hey, maybe I am just bitter because I wasn't on God's e-vite list.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35: "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church."

And this is the authority that they quote to justify homophobia?

That is all.

Interestingly, my lab is 100% female today. The lab next to us had one guy earlier this afternoon, but now it's also 100% female.

Rrrrrrrepresent!

Nineties Fashion Update: Coffee shop woman was wearing a white t-shirt under a pink long-sleeved waffle knit shirt, under a pair of overalls. That's right. Dickie's overalls, with the pale pinstripey aspect.

How can this trend possibly continue? Revamping the 60s a second time? Vintage 70s with vintage 90s twist in the year 2012? Fuck it, let's bust out the hoop skirts. I guess there is only so much ya can do with the old pants, skirts, and shirts thing, until we are all wearing unitard jumpsuits like in Star Trek TNG.

I saw "Proof" last night. It was quite good. Hey, kids, look! Math is hot!!!

Advisor pooped on my head last evening but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I don't know why I even bother to write anything, though, if he's just going to change it all. Why not just let him write the damn thing and save us both the trouble? My step-dad does a funny riff about this type of thing.

Boss: Bring me a stone!

Employee goes outside, picks up stone, brings to boss.

Employee: Here you go, sir.

Boss: Not this stone! Bring me a round stone!

Employee goes outside, picks up rounder stone, brings to boss.

Boss: That's not the right stone! Bring me a hard stone!

Employee stomps outside, selects a hard, round stone, brings to boss.

Boss: No, no, no, this stone is all wrong. Bring me a stone!

Ad infinitum.

It's funnier when he does it. But that is what I feel like sometimes. All right, I mean, I know he means well and it's better his way (mostly). But . . . but . . . aaargh!!!!! And then I feel like, Shit - if I were in any way clever or good at this I would have known the properties of the stone I was to have brought before I brought the wrong one so many times.

What he does, my inestimable advisor, is poop on my head and then give me a pep talk about how well I am doing. He beats me and then gives me flowers. "I only hit you because I love you, little graduate student!" And in a sense, it's better that he beat me up than I go out into the big cold world and other people's advisors beat me up when I'm not ready for it. Tough love. Thick skin. I fucking hate academic science.*

*Not true, I love it, but this part is not my favorite part.