-ologies
In the mood for a sweet scientific joke? Biology meets chemistry
I saw a restaurant called The True Taste, and I thought, well, okay, what is the true taste? So I went inside and looked at the menu, which had several sections. They were labeled "Brown Sugars," "Honeys," "Molasses" and "Artificials." I thought this was really weird, and I went over to the waiter and I said, "What's going on? Don't you guys serve food?" The waiter was actually the owner of the restaurant as well, and he explained to me that this was a tasting bar for sweeteners. He said that he had no background in the food industry, he'd never worked in a restaurant, but he was a Ph.D. biologist who worked on chemical sensing, and ...
Martin Gardner – Thanks for many hours of delight
Martin Gardner, a serious thinker and polymath, most famous for his mathematical puzzles and his Annotated Alice, died recently at the ripe old age of 95. Martin was at his most public during the years that he wrote the famous Mathematical Games column for Scientific American. I will miss him very much, not so much for his puzzles, which held little interest to me, but for his wide ranging essays and expositions on science, mathematics, philosophy and even poetry.
The Mosque near Ground Zero, continued – Britt Towery
Britt Towery weighs in on the mosque near Ground Zero, in his post entitled All religions subject to U.S. Constitution. Here is a highlight : The center is not at Ground Zero but two blocks away. It is not designed as a local mosque but to serve the wider community. It also is meant to improve interfaith relationships among people of every faith. In a nutshell it is promoting tolerance.
The Mosque near Ground Zero, continued – Leonard Pitts
Leonard Pitts asks:
... One wonders how far from Ground Zero ... [is it] proper for Muslims to build? A mile? Twenty? A hundred? Or maybe nowhere within the borders of these United States.
The Mosque near Ground Zero – Uniting Americans Against Terrorism
"Build the mosque near ground zero! Families of the Christian and Muslim victims can share common grief, and Christians and Muslims, together as Americans, can show common cause in the fight against global terrorism." -Thomas A. Wiebe, The Oregonian, Short Takes, Aug 1, 2010The Bard of Wasilla
Sarah Palin is now the self-styled Shakespeare of Twitter, and has stimulated a twitter-based exchange of wit; however, the humor only served to obscure the fear-mongering of Palin's initial message.
Our vital Microbiome: bacteria cure diseases too!
Recently, normal bacteria from a human gut were transplanted into another person who was suffering from a terrible gastrointestinal disease, and the disease was eradicated! The New York Times recently published an article noting this feat, and summarizing our current understanding of the human microbiome, as the microbial species that inhabit our body are collectively known.
Toyota Prius’s not so "sudden acceleration"
Do Toyotas suddenly accelerate? The Department of Transportation isn't having any of it; it appears to be pretty much just driver error.
"Superman violates the laws of physics!" (I will never live that down.)
Many years ago, my wife and I viewed the Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, which featured a scene wherein Superman sees Lois Lane being crushed in an earthquake, and so he flies around the earth faster than the speed of light so that he can go back in time and rescue Lois just before she is crushed.
My immediate response to this was "That couldn't happen; nothing can move faster than the speed of light." My wife's response was to start giggling without pause.
Craig Venter is utterly amazing!
Craig Venter and his team have taken a large step in synthetic biology: They have created a full bacterial chromosome starting from a computer model of the chromosome! Enter, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0.
Book review, Title The Death of Adam, Author Marilynne Robinson, Rating 2.5,
The Death of Adam
Marilynne Robinson
Book review
Modern Jeremiad
Marilynne Robinson's The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought could just as well have been entitled 'Modern Jeremiad', as its tone is often bleak, accusatory, and angry, sure that the world, and America in particular, has taken a set of massively wrong turns in terms of both its thinking and its behavior. This is a book that marks modern thought as empty of spiritual meaning, and continually contrasts secular (mostly failed) ideas and behaviors with Christianity's spirituality and ability to offer meaning and moral structure in a modern human's life. The essays are wildly uneven, and the variation in quality is quite wide; most are readable, but several are nigh on unreadable. If you were to read this book from back to front, you would, roughly speaking, be reading from the best essays to the worst.
Abiogenesis or Creation?
Abiogenesis currently amounts to little more than scientific parlor talk, which leaves us free to choose an explanation of the origin of life that is most personally satisifying.I think that life was more likely created by God than having arisen spontaneously on earth. I have read a number of scientific arguments regarding the origin of life. They differ markedly in some aspects, but they are consistent in arguing that life on earth is massively complex and a massive amount of time would be necessary for life to arise from non-life (formation of the first self-replicating cell, then the evolution of life to its current forms). Many of abiogenesis proponents suggest that the current estimate of the earth's age, 4.5 billion years, is not sufficient time for life to have arisen spontaneously! At any rate . . .
Movie Review, Title The Passion Of The Christ, Studio 20th Century Fox, Rating 1.5,
The Passion Of The Christ (2004)
Director: Mel Gibson
Movie Review
The goriest story ever told
The Passion of the Christ is a violent, unrelenting cascade of gore and violence against one man, Jesus Christ, and is one of the most offensive films I have personally seen. Many films have depicted Christ, but none in memory steeped his last few days on earth in gratuitous and pornographic violence while de-emphasizing the purpose of the suffering.
Bacteria talk to each other … new approach to antibiotics?
The old bacterial cell wall inhibitors, etc. are the antibiotics soon to be the past, obviously so because the bacteria have evolved means to defeat most of them, and we are out of good ideas to extend those methods, save at much too slow a pace. But much has been learned about bacteria in the past 20 years, and from this recent knowledge are born new points of attack!!!
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. Kilgore Trout
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
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