Science/Technology blog

Ohhh this picture makes me crack up. I took it outside “The Sink,” a bar in Boulder, Colorado when I was there a bit ago for a science conference. Yes, it says “STD Happy Hour.” I forget what it was suppost to stand for, but it did have some other meaning.

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As many of you know I lost my job a while back. After a long agonizing search I have finally found another. I’m still in the job market because this job just barely pays the bills - but at least I don’t have to worry about being homeless. It is pretty much manual labor and has me somewhat exhausted, so I am going to take a week off. When I return, hopefully refreshed, I hope to finish up some lingering business such as my series on semicircular canals.

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Check out this interesting op-ed piece in the NY Times today, on a case being heard in the Supreme Court over Bush’s faith-based initiatives.

The question before the court is whether a group seeking to preserve the separation of church and state can mount a First Amendment challenge to the Bush administration’s “faith based” initiatives. The arguments turn on a technical question of whether taxpayers have standing, or the right to initiate this kind of suit, but the real-world implications are serious. If the court rules that the group does not have standing, it will be much harder to stop government from giving unconstitutional aid to religion.

Soon after taking office, President Bush established the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and faith-based offices in departments like Justice and Education. They were intended to increase the federal grant money going to religious organizations, and they seem to have been highly effective. The plaintiffs cited figures showing that from 2003 to 2005, the number of federal grants to religious groups increased 38 percent. The Freedom From Religion Foundation and several of its members sued. They say that because the faith-based initiatives favor religious applicants for grants over secular applicants, they violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which prohibits government support for religion.

The Bush administration challenged the right of this organization to sue, trying to prevent them from even having their day in court. Why would they do that? Because, maybe, they realize that these faith-based initiatives are a gross misuse of taxpayer dollars and blatantly violate the separation of church and state. And if this case is eventually heard, it could open up a whole can of worms for the already-beleaguered administration, not to mention pissing off the religious fundies who haven’t been too happy with the state of things lately anyway.

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Chad is bemoaning the increase of “stat-geekery” in sports:

I’ll admit that I’m somewhat torn about this. I am, after all, a professional nerd, and enjoy working with numbers, so I can see the appeal of quantitative data. And a lot of the regular statistics used in basketball are pretty crude measures, so I can understand trying to develop better statistics.

Very, very crude. And that is where my beef comes from. Can you think of a sports’ statistic that includes a measure of error?

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Your definition of what’s deep and what’s not depends on your perspective. If you’re an oceanographer, 200m is deep. If you’re a snorkeler, 50 feet is deep. If you’re a reef-building coral, 50 meters is deep.

Craig and I forego our usual definition of deep (200m) this week so we can alert you to live feeds forthcoming from the Secrets of the Gulf Expedition March 3-9 with the US Navy NR1 nuclear submarine (pictured above) and Bob Ballard’s Argos tow sled as they survey the Flower Garden Banks region for paleo-shorelines and deep octocoral habitats at 100m depth. Tell your classmates, friends, and teachers. I’ll be taking part in the benthic surveys remotely. I hope you can, too. - P.

Follow along online with daily broadcasts from the field at
www.immersionpresents.org and
www.oceanslive.org.

Full information from the press release follows.

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Today the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Hein v Freedom From Religion Foundation, a case that revolves around the question of the taxpayer standing doctrine and whether citizens can sue for establishment clause violations based upon the use of their tax dollars. The case deals with whether government expenditures under Bush’s faith based initiative program violate the establishment clause. Chip Lupu and Robert Tuttle have a good background article on the legal issues in the case here.

The government is arguing that taxpayers lack standing to sue and the district court agreed with them and dismissed the suit. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that decision and granted standing. Now the Supreme Court will decide which is correct. I’ll post a fairly long excerpt from Lupu and Tuttle that explains the legal history of this issue:

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Thanks to global warming, the ban-the-bulb movement is gaining strength. Australian officials and European lighting manufacturers have announced phaseouts of the energy-draining bulb. A California legislator has proposed a ban. Now, in a move that could speed the move away from incandesent bulbs, some of the world’s largest bulbmakers have joined environmental groups and the California Energy Commission in talks that could lead to a phaseout in the US within a decade, sources say. ( CS Monitor)

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As stories on global warming become more alarming various subplots are beginning to emerge. Among them, incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before. ( LA Times)

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Hey, you mean America isn’t the sole refuge of pious war-mongers? I was sent this remarkable quote from Cardinal Meisner of Kцln:

Einem Gott lobenden Soldaten kann man gutenGewissens Verantwortung ÑŒber Leben und Tod andererÑŒbertragen, weil siebei ihm gleichsam von der Heiligkeit Gottes mitabgesegnet sind … Wem kдme es in den Sinn, Soldaten, die auch Beter sind , dannnoch als Mцrder zu diskriminieren. Nein, in betenden Hдnden ist dieWaffe vorMiЯbrauch sicher.

It begins “One can in good conscience give a God-praising soldier responsibility over the life and death of others” and ends with the fine sentiment that “In praying hands weapons are safe from abuse.” My German is rusty enough that I would have great difficulty detecting sarcasm in that language, so someone should tell me if I’m missing some essential subtlety in the translation.

So, I’m wondering … if a soldier faithfully wears a “Gott mit uns” belt buckle, does that suggest that he can do no evil?

Shall we assume that any Muslim who hits the prayer mat four times a day is harmless?

Is Germany planning to disarm any atheists in the ranks, because they can’t be trusted with their weapons?

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A story just came out today about drinking high fat vs. low fat milk, and the positive effect on fertility that the former can have. Remember the report that drinking milk increases twinning? Issues like this should be kept in mind when considering the spread of lactose tolerance, anything that increases fitness should spread. Why didn’t it? Well, it seems likely that cattle can’t be raised everywhere, so you have a situation where the selective benefit is geographically constrained. Also, modern lifestyles are characterized by no scarcity of calories so comparing this to pre-modern situations might be a false trail. The world wide spread of milk consumption should be changing things genetically though….

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